Cryonics Meets Teen Lit?

Young adult fiction isn't a genre I usually find myself exploring, let alone actively seeking out reading material from. However, a few months ago I became aware of a new novel entitled, I Was A Teenage Popsicle by newbie author Bev Katz Rosenbaum. As might be surmised from the title, the book is about an adolescent girl (sixteen-year-old Floe Ryan) who, along with her parents, undergoes cryonic suspension after succumbing to a fatal (fictional) respiratory disease.

I grew up reading science fiction, so I am no stranger to the subject of suspended animation -- however, it is odd and strangely compelling to see this subject pop up in something so far removed from sci-fi as the bubblegum world of novels written for an audience of eighth-grade girls. Could it be that the cryonics meme is, in fact, propagating through mainstream culture? Or is this simply an isolated incidence of an author happening to hear about a "weird" concept worth using as a plot device? Either way, I can admit without (much) shame that I'm finding I Was A Teenage Popsicle to be a fun (and fast) read -- I managed to get through about half of its 242 pages while installing new virus protection software on my computer earlier this evening.

And though the science is definitely thinner than what you might find in a "purer" sci-fi novel, Popsicle is surprisingly decently researched for a product of the YA genre. Early in the book, it is explained that:

"So they [my parents]...froze me." I can't seem to stop saying it.

"Well, yes and no," he [the doctor] says. "That's the term prople use -- even I use it on occasion -- but the process is really called vitrification. Freezing can preserve organs, but it also expands and destroys cells. Vitrification preserves the same way freezing does, without damaging cells. At least, the way we started doing it when you were brought in..."

I can't help but smile at a book that not only knows of the concept of vitrification, but takes pains throughout the novel to have the characters frequently correct one another such that the proper terminology is used (e.g., "Yeah, yeah, I wasn't frozen, I was vitrified, I know.").

The book also gets into some basic but interesting philosophical musings about the definition and nature of death:

"Well, let's just say you weren't really dead."

"Excuse me?" I say for the second time since waking up. Naturally, the doctor smiles again. "It's semantics, really. You see, Floe, people are considered legally dead when their heart and breathing stops. But when you're declared legally dead, it doesn't mean all your cells, tissues, and organs are dead."

This is a simple point, but an important one -- and one that I really hope at least manages to reach some of this book's actual target audience. Death is a process, not an event, and as stated on the Alcor site:

Calling someone "dead" is merely medicine's way of excusing itself from resuscitation problems it cannot fix today. This makes people feel better about abandoning the patient and making the unwarranted assumption that nobody could ever fix the problem. Cryonics, in contrast, is conservative care that acknowledges that the real line between life and death is unclear and not currently known. It is humility in the face of the unknown.

I Was A Teenage Popsicle may not win any prizes for depth of characterization or complex plot twists, but in a sense that is part of what makes it work. Popsicle succeeds, in part, because it doesn't try too hard to create a "tortured and conflicted" main character -- you have, instead, a spirited teenage girl whose hobbies include art and skating and whose wishes in life are simple and straightforward.

The book's overall tone is one that assumes that being alive is inherently good, and that freezing -- er, vitrifying -- people is a compassionate and proper thing to do in the event of fatal illness. The book's central conflict (that is, in addition to the genre-standard obligatory romantic sub-plot) consists of Floe's efforts to save her parents, since there's a chance that the cryonics center (where they are being held in suspension) might close down as a result of financial issues, complicated by the mewlings of a few patronizing deathists.

It is more than refreshing to read a book, albeit one aimed at teen girls, that not only presents life extension technology in a positive light, but that is completely devoid of annoying, moralizing messages about how death is somehow "natural" and that cryonics is some kind of abomination. I just love how the deathists in the book are the bad guys, and the good guys are the ones fighting to keep the cryonics center open and allow people to benefit from its services -- not to mention, speaking favorably of scientific progress. And I also like Floe's take on individual choice as it pertains to cryonics:

I'm thrown for a minute. Some people will have to wait hundreds of years for their cures. It's been hard for me just ten years after I was vitrified. Adventurous and spunky as I am, would I really want to come back a hundred years after being frozen? I'm not sure.

But I am sure other people would.

Popsicle doesn't specifically address aging or age-related death, but neither does it state that age-related death is somehow an exception to the idea that people ought to be permitted and enabled to seek life-extending treatments. And the lives of Floe's parents are not valued any less because they are older than their daughter -- cryonics patients in this book are (at least by the "good guys") treated as individuals with valuable lives, regardless of what generation they happened to belong to when they were vitrified.

Though there are some aspects of the writing that might make the average science-minded reader wince (pop culture references and celebrity name-dropping abounds), I see this book as something that has the potential to be, well, tremendously cool. If you're personally signed up for cryonics and are looking for a way to explain this to your young daughter or niece, this book might be just the thing to break the ice, so to speak. Or you can just get a copy for yourself as, er, cultural research.

All in all, I must offer a hearty applause to Ms. Katz Rosenbaum for offering an unlikely yet surprisingly effective treatment of quite a few prominent issues surrounding life, mortality, and emerging technologies in her first novel. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that author PJ Manney might classify as the kind of bilingualism necessary to make currently marginal concepts more accessible.

More on Vulnerability, Longevity, and Bias

I have been following this discussion on Overcoming Bias with interest over the past few days -- the question of "what are any person's chances of staving off age-related decline and death"? is one that invariably produces a great diversity of responses. My take on the matter, as explained in my last entry is that while nobody with a serious interest in their own survival can afford to think themselves invulnerable, it is quite reasonable to look at what kinds of real progress could be made and do whatever you can to help hasten that progress.

After all, overconfidence might feel good, but it could also kill you -- turning anti-aging science into a religion is not the way to make the science actually happen, just as surely as blowing yourself up on a battlefield is not the way to assure a place in an eternal paradise. And on the other end of the spectrum, convincing yourself that "nothing can be done" about aging can be seductive in a sense because it is true by default: without incremental yet ultimately radical interventions into senescence, storage diseases, cognitive decline, etc., we will all succumb to aging damage at some point. The key to thinking realistically about longevity is, perhaps, in finding a reasonable philosophical, cognitive, and even emotional position in which you are neither too certain of success nor too resigned to failure.

If a person does accept that they "will age and die", then how can they justify putting energy and resources into longevity medicine for themselves and others? There are alternatives to overconfidence other than Ultimate Resignation to Ultimate Failure No Matter What -- it's just that developing a rationally-operating mental algorithm for dealing with something that is, literally, a matter of life and death can be extremely difficult and fraught with emotional traps. While some people may be incapable of even considering the possibility of their own long-term longevity without developing serious and destructive overconfidence, this is not true of all people. Unsolvable problems aren't worth working on, and anyone who is even making the effort to survive long-term and/or help others survive long-term must at least in some way be making a concession that they find the problem of age-related infirmity and death to be potentially solvable.

At any given point in time, you can only predict certain aspects of the future to any reasonable probability, and you also only know so much about the present at any particular moment you happen to find yourself in. And for non-biologists -- which probably comprise the majority population of life-extensionists and advocates of longevity science -- it can be exceedingly tricky to accurately assess the state of the science that we all hope will eventually enable us to live longer and healthier lives than our ancestors could have ever imagined. Not that a layman can't develop a good working knowledge of biological principles and gain access to scientific journals, but there's certainly a difference between being immersed consistently in that sort of intellectual and practical material and reading about it in the evenings and on weekends while taking a respite from your day job.

Judging from the results of my own self-study, I do think that aging is at least tractable as an engineering problem -- that is, there's nothing supernatural or cosmic or special about it that renders it invulnerable to eventual intervention. I do think that as long as attitudes toward addressing age-related illness continue along the lines they're going now (that is, that things like heart disease and Alzheimer's and such are bad things that nobody should have to experience), there's a good chance that the academic consensus will come around to the logical conclusion that aging itself needs to be treated. I still think we're a bit of a way off from this, though.

But -- if we all sit here and do nothing -- if we all sit there passively hoping for anti-aging interventions to come sweep us up into an eternity of good health -- then we're all going to learn firsthand the truth of the statement, "Nothing fails like prayer". Similarly, if everyone decides that longevity medicine is Just Too Hard to even attempt, and we all convince ourselves that nothing can be done about it anyway, we'll be able to say on our deathbeds that we were "right" about longevity medicine not being developed -- because we didn't develop it! While I understand the need to avoid overconfidence bias, I also see a very real need to avoid pessimism bias of the sort that can lead to inaction through defeatism. The desire to be right can be, in my observation, just as powerful a motivator for some people as the desire to survive. As can the desire not to be laughed at, since humans are, by and large social animals very dependent upon being accepted by a group.

I am not discounting the significance of fear of death in sculpting a person's philosophical outlook, but I do know that there are other things with similar significance, at least in terms of short-term magnitude. I have encountered numerous people with the attitude that they are just going to live life as they please, engaging in whatever risky behavior suits them on a moment's whim -- not because they think they're invulnerable, but because they figure that they'd rather die doing what they enjoy most than "wasting away in a nursing home". Most people I've encountered, by and large, do see their own death as inevitable, particularly their own age-related death. I've even encountered smokers who claim that they feel their habit will enable them to die at a younger age, thereby skipping the "senile diaper years". I think that, more likely, longevity just isn't prioritized by many people except in the abstract (in the sense that most people would undergo treatment if they found out they had cancer, and most people, even senior citizens, do choose to partake of modern medicine -- entailing such things as hip replacement and bypass operations -- if the need arises).

However, there do seem to be some in the life-extensionist population specifically who have rather surprising amounts of confidence in their own future assured survival, and though there is a chance they know something I don't which somehow justifies this confidence, I have yet to see evidence of this knowledge. I do think there is a chance that some alive today will manage to prolong their lives indefinitely, but by no means do I think that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, aging is going to be "solved" by the time I turn fifty or anything like that. Progress is dependent on many variables, and there are too many "ifs" to make any kind of confident estimates of one's chances of "escaping" age-related death at this point. Quibbling about probabilities, placing bets, and arguing over whether one will or will not get to celebrate their 1000th birthday probably isn't worth a whole lot of time or energy. If enough people can agree that age-related decline deserves attention, then the proper course of action is to give it that proper attention -- directly, in the laboratory, in computers, in hospitals, in our homes, in doctor's offices.

All any of us can do is look to see which of those "ifs" we can influence, and perhaps support efforts like SENS, the MPrize and the development of AGI, or even become scientists ourselves, or come up with something we think is more likely to yield results than any existing organized effort. We can all help to author the yet-unwritten future so that, at the very least, it is more likely to yield longer, healthier lives for all who seek them.

Vulnerable, But Not Doomed

Do we really need to "come to terms" with death in order to be psychologically healthy? Many would assume that the answer to this question is "yes", but where does that leave the rational life-extensionist?

Some of us today might very well reach some degree of escape velocity, through a combination of healthy living, luck, and simply being in the right place at the right time -- but no one person can afford any degree of complacency. And while the laboratory work and technological development continues, those directly or indirectly involved with such efforts will continue to struggle with developing what we feel is the most rational outlook with regard to the future, and our prospects of living to see more of it than a traditional human life expectancy would allow.

Considering that we don't have real anti-aging medicine yet, and that human bodies are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of random destructive phenomena that could hit at any time, and that the planet itself isn't likely to be a habitable home forever (and we've yet to establish a viable means of escape in the event that Earth does become a fatally hostile environment), a belief that one will somehow manage to escape all possible threats to personal existence for as long as time exists can't possibly be based on much of anything in the way of real supportive data. However, I don't think most life-extensionists see things that way.

Certainty about the distant future is not something any of us can possibly have -- there are too many things that could happen, too much data that could come to light just when we think we might have everything "important" figured out.

This is actually part of the reason why I don't think that life-extensionists should concern ourselves with making sure we come to an absolute acceptance that yes, we are definitely going to die, particularly of age-related causes.

I'm not saying we should all assume we won't die -- that would be just as bad, and less supported by the presently-obtained historical data to boot. I'm saying that making absolute assumptions about the distant future is irrational, and does not add value to any conception of reality, except in the sense of lending someone personal comfort (and remember that it is just as possible for a person to be comforted by the idea of eventual death as by the idea of immortality -- pessimism is a great refuge for those who want to be right a majority of the time without having to personally lift a finger to influence the outcome of events).

What I do think life-extensionists would do well to accept, and come to terms with (and I'd wager most of us already have), is the fact that each of us is vulnerable. With regard to psychological well-being, I think that developing a sense of perspective regarding one's own vulnerability and fragility (particularly with regard to the present human form) can enable people to face reality with minimal distortion -- which, ostensibly, is the same goal that the death-acceptance advocates have in mind.

Except for the fact that we don't make an exception for aging, we life-extension supporters aren't really much different from anyone else in our desire to live.

Try as I might, I just can't see how death due to "old age" is somehow more palatable than death due to a brain tumor or drowning or getting hit by a car -- and yet you'll hear plenty of people waxing eloquent with metaphors about blooming and dying flowers or melting snowflakes or the turning of leaves in reference to aging into death.

Personally, I'm no more a rose or a snowflake than I am an E. Coli bacterium or a blowfish -- poetry is one thing, but it most certainly should not be invoked in the context of trying to convince people that while it's a good thing to wear their seatbelts, it would be a bad thing to undergo treatments that could (for instance) clean up accumulated damage due to old age, or support the development of such treatments.

There's a difference between working to make healthy life extension a reality and "dreaming of immortality". And there is definitely a difference between mythical ideas of immortality and the kinds of lives people are likely to be able to lead in an era of life-extending treatments.

Life extension technology can (and probably will) allow a lot of people more time to live, but it's doubtful that it will ever offer anyone the kind of certainty with regard to continued existence that mythical immortality does. Vigilance and maintenance (it will be interesting to see what is necessary to keep a four-hundred-year old alive!) will probably always be necessary, and regardless of what technology is developed, none of us really knows for sure how long we'll be able to take in data, form memories, and interact with other minds.

No matter how long we live, there's always a chance that we might not live to see another day. But at the same time, the longer we live, the closer we move toward an era when people might be able to access treatments enabling them to live a lot longer than they might otherwise have. The chance that we will live to see another day is always there, as well. And this can be acknowledged without any kind of faith, without any sense of certainty, and without the need to think of onesself as invulnerable or indestructible.

Reality may not be there to cater to your every whim, but it's not out to get you, either.

All Kinds of Potential Minds

(This is partly in response to blogger Drew, who commented on my last post):

This episode really got me thinking. I had to pause the audio when the issue came up of integrating neurodiversity into the discussion of “possible mind space” in artificial general intelligence.

I can't claim credit for the "possible mind space" concept; I believe I first encountered it in the context of a talk by Eliezer Yudkowsky -- it is an extremely useful concept, though, and one that is important to keep in mind whenever postulation about what the term "mind" means in the first place. One trap that must be avoided with regard to thinking about cognitive enhancement, artificial intelligence, and the "medicalization" (or lack thereof) of existing neurophysiological variations in sentient creatures is that of working under the (possibly unconscious) assumption that the range of possible self-aware processing mechanisms that can be thought of as "minds" is far narrower than it actually is.

While recognizing that each existing person is quite unique even in the midst of an assumed-normative range of neurological and biological characteristics, it does seem to be true that most people hold some personal notion regarding the nature of a "normal" mind, and that most people do have difficulty recognizing the potential validity of minds that differ sufficiently from their own. Some of this is probably rooted in the lack of a coherent definition of "mind" in the first place (or at least, a widely-accepted, concise, parametric definition) -- that is, a person might avoid classifying a given piece of phenomena they encounter as a "mind" not due to any kind of prejudice or lack of imagination, but due to the fact that they themselves simply don't know what sorts of phenomenological data point to a mind "being there" at all.

The question, from the perspective of someone encountering a phenomenon that could potentially fall into the category of "mind", commonly ends up being a rather utilitarian one: if a mind exists in one's vicinity, different obligations are owed to that mind than would be owed to an inanimate object (though it should be recognized that there could very well be minds in the "potential mind-space" that would actually prefer to be treated as one might treat a toaster -- we simply don't know!). A mind-possesing entity will, conceivably have some set of native demands; at the very least, it will require resources -- material, energy, informational, what have you.

So, when the "known" mind (say, a present-day human person) encounters a given piece of unfamiliar phenomena, the question of whether this phenomenon has a mind, or is a mind, becomes pertinent, particularly when the human is faced with issues of resource scarcity (perceived or actual) or information need (since the identification of a particular thing as a mind could end up being tremendously important if, say, the human is in the midst of attempting to solve a problem that the local set of available minds has found too perplexing to make much headway on).

Humans, at present, do not have much in the way of sophisticated means of (a) detecting minds, or (b) establishing the validity of an identified mind. Humans tend to rely not only on behavioral signals, but on typical behavioral signals -- many of which can be culture-typical.

For instance, an American who makes little eye contact might be considered "shifty" or untrustworthy -- or possibly autistic, and many nonautistic humans have difficulty acknowledging the validity of autistic cognition. However, a person who makes less eye contact is born into a culture where direct eye contact is considered rude or presumptuous would not stand out, even if his or her instinctual predilection is not to make eye contact based on neurological factors.

If the variation in behavior is limited in this example to that of eye contact (or lack thereof), it seems quite clear that while a mind might be recognized in both cultures as existing, that mind will only be considered fully valid in the country where direct eye contact is not the social norm.

When you add in other behavioral variables -- responsiveness (or lack thereof) to verbalizations from other persons in the vicinity, presence or absence of typically-communicative speech, apparent ability to carry out what are considered "basic" life skill functions -- you end up with a very complex set of external factors that are commonly used in the assessment of a person's inner life, even when they may have little to no correlation with how the person actually perceives and experiences reality. It amazes me that people who have no problem believing that they'd be able to recognize a manifestation of artificial intelligence could have trouble accepting the idea of a person who does not speak or look anyone in the eye, but who is also fully capable of experiencing a complex inner life.

If AI were to emerge "inside a computer", would this AI only be recognized as valid if it created an avatar that looked human, and that provided culture-typical human responses (perhaps in the context of a two-way conversation, in which the avatar on the screen interacted with the programmer as one might with someone on a video-conferencing system)? Or, is it critical (as I believe it is) for humans to avoid narrowing the scope of "potential mind-space", perhaps to the exclusion of a myriad of valid minds, some of which might communicate in ways that would not be recognized as typical?

One issue I find quite intriguing is the question of whether the existence of a mind necessarily means that that mind is capable of communication with other minds -- and if so, how can we work on sorting deliberate communication from random (or perhaps, more properly, pseudorandom) phenomena?

A less behaviorally-based means of determining the presence and nature of minds is imperative -- or at least, the spectrum of what is to be considered purposeful and/or meaningful behavior must be widened considerably. This doesn't mean assuming everything anything does is purposeful or indicative of a mind (or a valid mind), but rather, seeking out and acknowledging "proof of concept" examples of cases in which existent minds do not conform to the expected behavioral manifestation that would typically be expected to correspond with a mind of particular complexity.