(I actually find a fair bit of discussion, even on subjects I'm really interested in, somewhat inaccessible due to copious use of widgets, so I am glad there is at least some non-widgety conversation to be had (or at least people who can deal with non-widgetiness on my end).)
So I'm going to attempt to explain my views as they (albeit by no means immovably) stand now, and hopefully this explanation makes sense.
Certainly, people have made some pretty wild claims about cryonics, and there's been a lot of over-hyping of its potential, and it's a subject around which one must be extremely careful (that is, presuming one wants to avoid falling into crackpot wishful-thinking traps).
However: if you can manage to scrape away enough of the subcultural detritus and personality artifacts that have glommed onto cryonics over the years, what you're left with is:
(a) an experiment in tissue preservation,
(b) the idea that future technology may someday be able to repair injury and illness not addressable by today's medicine, and
(c) a view of death as a process rather than a discrete event.
None of these things seem to me particularly irrational or farfetched in and of themselves.
Of course in reality you can't actually ignore the cultural connotations and fringe entanglements of something like cryonics. These things must be acknowledged and addressed if one wants to actually have a clear view of the subject, and that's part of what I am trying to do here.
E.g., I think the notion of cryonics has been harmed by assertions that it's a means to (even potentially) "buy immortality". Immortality, after all, is incoherent -- nobody knows how long they or anyone else is going to live, and it might end up being a pretty long time, but it sure as heck isn't going to be forever, any more than having a job gives you a shot at making Infinity Zillion Dollars.
(It's not that I'm pessimistic, it's that some things that work on paper turn to dust when you try and force-fit them into the real world, and I'm pretty darn sure "immortality" is one of these things, as it essentially requires that biological entities be transmuted into perpetual-motion machines.)
But when it comes to item (a) above, which amounts to the question of "might it be possible to vitrify and later de-vitrify (and reanimate) a mammal?", there you at least have something concrete you can test. Such an experiment would be perfectly at home in the realm of cryobiology (though cryonics and cryobiology are not one and the same). So as far as "intriguing fringe ideas" go, cryonics actually comes out ahead in my book, for the mere fact of actually having a significant testable component.
The issue I think most people (and I do count myself in this category here) have difficulty with when considering cryonics as a concept relates to its built-in speculative component, (b): that of the notion of eventually repairing presently-fatal pathology with as-yet-nonexistent technology.
It requires a certain sort of mindset to take the idea of future reparative technologies (not to mention a future culture where reanimating cryonics patients is considered a good and proper thing to do) seriously enough to actually consider signing up for cryonics a worthwhile act. And to the extent that this mindset is entangled with things even more marginal than cryonics (and note that by "marginal" I don't mean "unpopular with the intellectual elite/cultural mainstream" but rather "removed from concrete reality by greater than two or so degrees"), you can count me among its critics.
However, I see a significant difference between the "just dip the person in liquid nitrogen, and maybe someday the nanobots will be able to put him back together" scenario, and the "vitrify the person so as to minimize cellular damage and maybe someday we'll be able to devitrify her and take care of that pesky tumor" scenario. Clearly some scenarios associated with cryonics (and perhaps the majority up until fairly recently) have been ridiculous. But I don't think they're all ridiculous. The details matter.
As for (c), viewing death as a (potentially interruptible) process rather than an event, this is not unique to cryonics by any means. Wikipedia has this to say regarding death (emphasis mine):
The chief concern of medical science has been to postpone and avert death. Death in this context is now seen as less an event than a process: conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible. Where in the process a dividing line is drawn between life and death depends on factors beyond the presence or absence of vital signs. In general, clinical death is neither necessary nor sufficient for a determination of legal death. A patient with working heart and lungs determined to be brain dead can be pronounced legally dead without clinical death occurring.
So, in other words, "death" in real life is not the cartoon image of a person's ghost or soul abruptly and forever leaving the body; it's more complicated than that, and the process is more drawn out, and has even changed definitions multiple times throughout history. Hence the idea that if death is in fact a process, if we can find some way to halt the process before critical brain structures are destroyed forever, there might be some chance of bringing the person back.
A Tentative and Cautious Enthusiasm
In light of the above, "a tentative and cautious enthusiasm" pretty well describes what I have for cryonics these days. I have always been fascinated by the liminal spaces in human experience, and cryonics is one all about such spaces, aiming as it does to act in that fuzzy twilight between life and death as we know them.
As noted in my prior post on this subject, I suspect that the biggest breakthroughs in suspension per se will probably occur as techniques like therapeutic hypothermia advance. After all, there is a solid basis for supposing that extremely low temperatures can protect the brain and permit recovery even after a person has been clinically dead and in circulatory arrest for quite a while; there are multiple documented accounts of this.
But, having done some more reading lately, I've learned that there have been some promising developments as a result of the efforts of people motivated to improve cryonic suspension techniques specifically. Most significantly, rabbit kidneys have actually been successfully vitrified, de-vitrified, and found to be functioning following this process. Of course this isn't proof positive that the same thing will be accomplished for the brain, but it's not a bad start.
Now, about whether trying to enable interrupted lives to continue in the future is ethically coherent: I would say, sure it is.
I have long believed that nobody ever suddenly becomes worthless as a function of being sufficiently aged, disabled, etc. I think people in comas are worthy of life. I think people who need ventilators and feeding tubes for decades on end are worthy of life. I think heart patients in a state of therapeutic hypothermia are worthy of life. I don't think there's anything noble about "pulling the plug" on someone or requesting that it be pulled on you. And so on.
Because of my convictions here, I feel it would be hypocritical and just plain unethical to sit here and assert that some people just need to give up and rot under a tree somewhere, because the world has already given them enough, or something. And I don't need to believe in perpetual-motion incoherence in order to assert that I think humans ought to be pursuing more and better ways to protect and preserve wanted lives, and that to the extent cryonics (or anything related to it) could help in this regard, I am all for it.
14 comments:
Anne, it's a pleasure to see your thinking develop on this issue, with extension to the whole world of consideration of the import of technological change, the meaning of value, and the relationship of these to one's perception of self.
Apologies for the conceptual "widgets"; I can indeed speak simply about simple things, but when attempting to convey a "bigger picture" I resort to communicating the essence of an increasingly coherent structure, rather than the substance of the increasingly incoherent and various manifestations it supports.
Given greater bandwidth, understanding would be enhanced by doing both and more—describing structural regularities along with sufficient examples appropriate to the background of the other. Throw in a dash of humor, reassurances of mutual respect and humanity (to counter the apparent inhumanity of crystalline abstraction), add a bit of interactive give and take and then the path would become more productive. But that is not the reality of online discussion circa 2009.
I appreciate and enjoy your sharing of your experiences, and the ongoing refinement of your map of the territory. You do us a valuable service. But there are areas yet to be drawn in, and wrinkles yet to be smoothed out.
You and I both view cryonic preservation of biological tissues (or more significantly, the information they record and represent) as an increasingly viable technology, worthy of ongoing development.
But our thinking appears to diverge mainly in terms of perceived personal benefit. Who is that person you would pay money for today, far away in a vastly different world, and what meaning does that person X represent for you relative to all else you value today including spouse, children, education, other worthwhile causes promoting increasing quality of life (or the meta-good of research promoting increasingly effective approaches to increasing quality of life) in the here and now?
Simply put, how do you discount the future, including your future "self"?
Or do you consider the value of an assumed essential self (tagged as "you") to be nearly infinite or unmeasurable, and thus worth any moderately affordable expense in the here and now?
I would also highlight your point that "I have long believed that nobody ever suddenly becomes worthless as a function of being sufficiently aged, disabled, etc. I think people in comas are worthy of life..."
Here again we are in agreement, but from opposite directions.
You assert that nobody becomes worthless, implying that everyone (everything?) is worth saving.
I assert that everyone and everything has (necessarily subjective) value, thus it is all the more important that we discern and choose wisely how and where we apply our limited resources.
One of us is dealing in infinities, and that is the core of the incoherence, the singularity of self that I sometimes seek to illuminate.
Best to you, and thanks again for sharing so much of your personal journey.
Is there a relationship between autism and interest in cryonics?
I write this as someone who has signed up for cryonics and has read a lot about autism.
Jef:
You do get kind of "widgety" at times, but you also seem tolerant enough of my non-widgetiness, which is more than I can say for some. At least you know when you're being really abstract; the people I tend to have the most trouble communicating with are the ones who invoke really abstract abstractions but don't realize it and think they're being perfectly concrete.
Jef wrote:
Who is that person you would pay money for today, far away in a vastly different world, and what meaning does that person X represent for you relative to all else you value today including spouse, children, education, other worthwhile causes promoting increasing quality of life (or the meta-good of research promoting increasingly effective approaches to increasing quality of life) in the here and now?
Simply put, how do you discount the future, including your future "self"?
Maybe I need to find some of my writings from when I was between the ages of 19 and 22 or something, because (and I could be wrong about this) I'm getting the impression that you don't see me as having ever seriously questioned the notion of a "unitary essential self". I'm not insulted by this or anything, as how would you know if I never explained it to you? But for the record, I've actually spent a lot of time delving into that very issue.
I'll try to explain some. But some of my language on this subject will probably seem odd, as it's a difficult topic for me to language, especially when it comes to certain experiences I've had in trying to process this stuff.
I think it was when I was about 16 that it suddenly hit me one day that I didn't know who "I" was (or, more generally, what made any person who they were). I considered this fairly obsessively for a short while, and tentatively decided that people were "the sum of their memories and experiences" (at least, that's how I articulated my conclusion then). This was enough to quiet my mind for a while.
But then, when I was 19, I started wondering again. I was going through a very busy and exhausting period in my education, which meant I wasn't sleeping enough and was often dehydrated, etc. This had me in a near-constant state of sensory and cognitive overload, and I suspect my brain decided to drop some high-load processes in order to permit me to keep functioning.
In any case, the result was that at one point everything around me seemed to be "breaking up into pixels". And, at the same time, I realized one day that "I" didn't feel like I actually existed, at least not in any sense that could just be taken for granted.
In some respects it was as if I was not anything like a coherent "person", but rather a little current of intention wiggling around in the Total Perspective Vortex. Another analogy is that it felt like I was somehow "behind the scenes", and the whole of reality as humans knew it, from that vantage point, seemed like the result of so many special effects and magician's tricks, including the reality of "self".
It was like all the frameworks I'd been taught to keep track of objects and "self" in realtime had been smashed to bits.
(Incidentally, I suspect this is common in autistic people, as many of us are capable of operating for a while in a totally non-sustainable mode, the consequence of which is that eventually we will end up either "crashing" or as in my case, losing whatever tentative grip we might have on "non-native processing modes".
There are documented studies pointing toward autistics processing low-level perceptual data atypically, and this to me seems supported by how I and at least some others on the spectrum tend to approach tasks like drawing. Which is to say that we don't look at an object like a chair and invoke a generic category of "chair" in our minds to draw; rather, we look directly at the shapes, contours, and patterns making up the object and draw those.).
In any case, what I eventually realized was that things didn't have to be irreducible and non-pixelly in order to be "real" at the macro-levels at which humans usually operate.
If you demand that things be unitary and irreducible in order to be real, nothing we deal with on a day to day basis would count as "real", which would make the notion of realness sort of incoherent.
So now I can look at the world, and at concepts like "person" and "self", and know that of course there are ways of mentally deconstructing these concepts into parts and mechanisms.
But the parts and mechanisms that comprise and give rise to, say, a friend or a grandmother or a kitten, do not render friends, grandmothers, and kittens somehow "meaningless" or lacking in coherence on some level that can be said to matter. The thing about meaningfulness is that we as conscious persons are the ones responsible for upholding it and determining it to begin with -- it is not going to be handed down from on high.
So, given all that, the question of "who is that person I would pay money for?" (whether that be my grandmother, my neighbor Bob, or myself, presumably to enable them hypothetically to "wake up" following a period of hypothetical suspended animation) in a vastly different world seems answerable in the same terms upon which I'd justify keeping someone in a coma on life support for years.
That is, regardless of any philosophy someone might be able to invoke about "the illusion of continuity of self", or about how each of us is "just" a conglomeration of values temporarily attached to a particular chunk of meat, our day to day experience shows us that people who (for instance) go in for lifesaving surgery are both (a) happy to be alive when they come out of anaesthesia, and (b) generally of an impression that they are still the same person they were prior to the operation.
(Note that I am not claiming anywhere in here that cryonics is equivalent to surgery with general anaesthesia, or to coma -- obviously it is not trivial that people have emerged from comas and anaesthesia but not from vitrification at this time. I am just saying that I don't think anything which results in indeterminately long periods of unconsciousness ought to draw into question whether it's "worth" keeping someone in circumstances which may enable them to wake up someday.
Yes, resources are limited and all, but I don't think humans have done anything close to a good job yet of trying to re-prioritize. I mean, really -- we live in a world right now where some people are living alone in gigantic houses and buying $100,000 handbags, while others are being guilt-pressured to opt for euthanasia because of the "burden" they supposedly represent. Something is wrong there.
And in light of this, while it's certainly fascinating to delve deeply into the mechanisms of self and consciousness and intent, etc., I don't think it matters whether someone is (per whatever branch of formal philosophy) "the same person" they were when they were five or fifteen, when it comes to figuring whether they "ought" to be kept alive in a coma or whatnot when they're fifty. The fact that they think they're the same person (or would if awake), even if they're using a definition of "person" that seems simplistic to someone going around deconstructing everything, should be enough to merit at least trying to save their life.
No, of course we won't be able to "save everyone, forever". That's an incoherent notion. But that doesn't discount the value of things like life support and emergency medicine, and I suspect you'd agree with me on that.)
James D. Miller:
Is there a relationship between autism and interest in cryonics?
I've come across a number of people on the autistic spectrum (other than myself) who are interested in cryonics, but I've not taken a large-scale survey nor heard of one being taken. So it's not really possible to state anything definitive here.
But: I do suspect that when a person is already on the social margins, something that is certainly common for autistic persons, there's probably at least a greater than average tendency to publicly espouse interests in certain things that are seen as "weird" or "nerdy" by the majority.
Personally I don't care a bit whether anyone thinks I'm weird or nerdy; I've been called those things and worse throughout my life. What I do care about is whether or not my beliefs are true (or at least well-supported), and what, if any, ethical consequences could come about as a function of exercising my interests.
So as far as cryonics goes, I am very concerned about the prospects of actually being a crackpot or perpetuating crankery (which I think is harmful in how it distorts peoples' view of what science actually is and how it works). But I couldn't care less if someone decides being interested in cryonics makes me a dorkface.
Certainly some autistic people can go through phases of (usually due to bullying) being really insecure and wanting to be "cool" just like any other person (especially in adolescence). But if I may be permitted a generalization here, it seems that oftentimes when we're interested enough in something, it really doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of it.
As for me, I care what other people think only in the sense that sometimes other people (due to having education, experience, expertise, etc. that I don't) can provide helpful and useful information that, once I know it, can help me make my choices and actions more ethical and based on more accurate premises. But I'm a lot less swayed than average (insofar as I can tell) by people sneering at the uncoolness of my interests.
(Incidentally, I've been kind of annoyed to see some of the folks advocating...really marginal silly stuff claiming that they're just being persecuted for being "uncool" in the face of criticism. There's a difference between calling something uncool and pointing out where it's incoherent, full of holes, etc.)
If a passerby may venture to comment:
I don't expect cryonics to work, because I don't believe the neurocomputational atomism at work in the ordinary materialistic ideas about how self and brain relate. The usual idea is that the physical reality of the brain is trillions of causally coupled but nonetheless physically distinct episodes of neurons firing, and that consciousness, the mind, the self, etc., are somehow emergent from this, or identical with fuzzy collective properties of that trillion-event ensemble, and so forth.
I would maintain, however, that the essence of consciousness is a form of subjective unity which must also be, at some level, an actual and objective unity (and I say this even bearing in mind the cessation and alteration of consciousness apparent in sleep, dreams, and other altered states, as well as odd subjectivities like your teenage experience of a pixelizing world)... and that this is obviously something other than the fuzzy collectivities you can find in a trillion-strong mass of neural firings. To believe that the former is, identically, the latter, is either to believe in magic (to believe in the identity of two things which in themselves appear to be irremediably distinct), or it's a stealth dualism, in which a person simply associates one with the other, but habitually thinks of this association as an identity. The only reason people make these identifications is... not quite desperation, but a sense of necessity; they believe that the brain is as described above, and that the only alternative to monistic materialism is supernatural dualism, and so it simply must be the case that the one (the subjectively experienced conscious mind) is the same as the other (the trillion-part chunk of brain meat).
I would point out, however, that even when considered merely physically, this picture is not necessarily correct. The key is quantum entanglement; the phenomenon of "particles" and other "quantum systems" whose probability functions are combined in such a way that they cannot be separated into individual states. My hypothesis is that things which are entangled really are one thing, that the world therefore contains complex unities which are more than just the physical sum of simpler entities, and that consciousness is the internal experience of being one of these exceptionally complex unities, one which, in physical terms, we would describe as an extensive zone of entanglement within the brain. And (to return to cryonics), since I would not expect this zone of entanglement to remain a unity through the cryopreservation process, I would not expect the person to survive. As there are clearly parts of the brain which carry out unconscious information processing, and which must therefore not be part of the hypothesized quantum unity, but rather more like the classical picture of the brain as quasi-digital network, one might suppose that cryonics could preserve some of these unconscious classical co-processors, a consciousness-instantiating quantum entanglement might be created in their vicinity, and it might then take on the qualities of memory and personality defining the vanished self, in the same (unknown) way that the unconscious brain imparts these things to the conscious part of the brain. I suppose (given the radically underspecified nature of my theory on this score) that I should be open to the possibility that cryonics allows, if not physical continuity of a quantum self, its reinstantiation in a new quantum unity by the same means responsible for the constitution of the old self in the pre-suspension natural brain. But I just have this nagging feeling that a lot more of what we count as concrete individuality (e.g. that sum of memories and experiences you mention) may inhabit the complex unity itself, rather than its simpler co-processors; and that while this complex unity continues to exist even during episodes of unconsciousness (because micro-physiologically conditions are not that different), it may not survive a process as physically traumatic as the liquid-nitrogen deep freeze.
Mitchell, you've eloquently expressed some of what I was thinking in the last cryonics article.
It seems like the best way to pursue cryonics, at this point, would be to concentrate the efforts on less complex tissue preservation. If it's pursued in a way that could benefit people as soon as possible, the field might attract the attention necessary to answer the tougher questions. I'm one of millions who have sustained spinal injuries. There are many real-world applications where cryonics would be invaluable. Preserving limbs, organs, and more specifically nerve tissue (it takes a ridiculously long time to grow) will undoubtedly change the medical field. And yes, I researched cryo and made inquiries just after my injury several years ago. :P Regardless of whether or not it could help me personally today, I hope that others who experience anything relatively similar will soon have more options due to this type of research.
It's also interesting to think of how cryonics advances will benefit so many other fields that are currently growing rapidly. Prosthetics are getting a lot better, but this fact combined with the ability to preserve nerve tissue will likely yield some pretty far-fetched results. They are, after all, pathways to the brain.
Mitchell: Certainly, any passerby who isn't a spammer or troll is free to comment. And you appear to be neither of those. =]
Mitchell wrote: My hypothesis is that things which are entangled really are one thing, that the world therefore contains complex unities which are more than just the physical sum of simpler entities, and that consciousness is the internal experience of being one of these exceptionally complex unities, one which, in physical terms, we would describe as an extensive zone of entanglement within the brain.
Interesting. I've wondered stuff along these lines myself, though haven't been able to articulate it very well. But if I'm understanding your statements properly, it looks like you might be touching on something I've been trying to figure out how to talk about for a while now. And that is the idea that as an individual brain develops, there's stuff happening to make that brain "uniquely interconnected" in very complex ways at very deep levels, such that you really wouldn't be able to "break down" what made that person who they were on a physical level without destroying the individual. And this state of affairs need not entail invocation of the supernatural, just particular, complex physical truisms.
I've heard people describing an individual consciousness as something like a "wave function" before, and suggesting that when the "wave function" collapses, the person is gone forever -- is that anything like what you mean?
(Mind you of course I am still trying to work all this stuff out myself, and I'm neither a neurobiologist nor a physicist, so I'm not making strong claims here, just putting ideas out for discussion and relating what I've read/heard in the past).
Mitchell wrote: And (to return to cryonics), since I would not expect this zone of entanglement to remain a unity through the cryopreservation process, I would not expect the person to survive....But I just have this nagging feeling that a lot more of what we count as concrete individuality (e.g. that sum of memories and experiences you mention) may inhabit the complex unity itself, rather than its simpler co-processors; and that while this complex unity continues to exist even during episodes of unconsciousness (because micro-physiologically conditions are not that different), it may not survive a process as physically traumatic as the liquid-nitrogen deep freeze.
Well, I definitely agree that there are processes physically traumatic enough to destroy the "what makes a person who they are" essentials of a brain. Dipping a brain in liquid nitrogen seems certain to accomplish this -- you might preserve the macroscopic structure, but the cellular/subcellular damage would likely be as bad as if you'd stuck the brain in a blender.
So, right now my tentative sense of feasibility re. cryonics is sort of contingent upon whether a mammalian brain can be demonstrated to be "de-vitrifiable". Vitrification isn't the same as just dipping something in liquid nitrogen -- it permits extremely low temperatures to be reached without actual freezing taking place. So if it's the freezing damage that's the main problem, then vitrification might be a way to circumvent that, so long as minimally toxic vitrification agents are identified (right now toxicity is still an issue, despite the successes with rabbit kidneys).
"Vitrification is a process of converting a material into a glass-like amorphous solid that is free from any crystalline structure, either by the quick removal or addition of heat, or by mixing with an additive."
"A cryoprotectant is a substance that is used to protect biological tissue from freezing damage (damage due to ice formation).. ..Mixtures of cryoprotectants have less toxicity and are more effective than single-agent cryoprotectants."
"Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) or ice structuring proteins (ISPs) refer to a class of polypeptides produced by certain vertebrates, plants, fungi and bacteria that permit their survival in subzero environments. AFPs bind to small ice crystals to inhibit growth and recrystallization of ice that would otherwise be fatal. There is also increasing evidence that AFPs interact with mammalian cell membranes to protect from cold damage. This work suggests the involvement of AFPs in cold acclimatization."
"Cryptobiosis is an ametabolic state of life entered by an organism in response to adverse environmental conditions such as desiccation, freezing, and oxygen deficiency. In the cryptobiotic state, all metabolic procedures stop, preventing reproduction, development, and repair. An organism in a cryptobiotic state can essentially live indefinitely until environmental conditions return to being hospitable. When this occurs, the organism will return to its metabolic state of life as it was prior to the cryptobiosis."
"Cryopreservation is a process where cells or whole tissues are preserved by cooling to low sub-zero temperatures, such as (typically) 77 K or −196 °C (the boiling point of liquid nitrogen)."
Just a few useful wiki definitions/links.. Here's an article on human hibernation. And another neat one on regeneration/immortality.
I wonder if there might be a way to use a combination of techniques to achieve something similar to the proposed state of suspended animation that cryonics seeks to achieve. Perhaps a human body could be cryogenically frozen in the "traditional" way, but the process could be isolated to specific regions, carefully avoiding the brain/stem (without removal), which could be subjected to something more like an induced coma, or "hibernation." I've heard that the brain is capable of living longer than the body. But if there is indefinitely a need for near-freezing temperatures to protect and adequately slow it's processes, then it seems necessary to observe the rate of any cellular destruction and try to compensate for it by simultaneously regenerating/replacing the cells with the use of various nanotechs. Once the conditions are right and regeneration has been achieved, perhaps a BCI could replace any lost information. So basically, if the theoretical process of regeneration/information uploading here could achieve a rate equal to the process of destruction, then it seems plausible that physical trauma (as described in the comments here) could be minimized and maybe even canceled out altogether.
"Karl Lashley had suggested in his famous essay, In Search of the Engram, that the brain must store a memory image everywhere, throughout its substance, rather than in localized areas or specific circuits. A brain can be wounded or physically damaged in various ways, sometimes massively damaged – and yet retain its power to remember images. Lashley concluded that "It is not possible to demonstrate the isolated localization of a memory trace anywhere within the nervous system. Limited regions may be essential for learning or retention of a particular activity, but within such regions the parts are functionally equivalent. The engram is represented throughout the region.""
Here is another fascinating blog with relevant topics that seem to further substantiate much of what Mitchell was describing.
Anderson wrote: ...it seems necessary to observe the rate of any cellular destruction and try to compensate for it by simultaneously regenerating/replacing the cells with the use of various nanotechs. Once the conditions are right and regeneration has been achieved, perhaps a BCI could replace any lost information. So basically, if the theoretical process of regeneration/information uploading here could achieve a rate equal to the process of destruction, then it seems plausible that physical trauma (as described in the comments here) could be minimized and maybe even canceled out altogether.
(Disclaimer: what follows is a bit of a rant, and I don't want you (Anderson) to think it's all about, or directed, at you personally. I am putting it here for the sake of anyone who might come across this post or this blog interested in cryonics, etc., because I've realized there are a lot of pitfalls one has to watch out for and avoid when it comes to this sort of thing. And I do appreciate the definitions of vitrification, cryopreservation, etc., you posted; thanks for that.)
One of the things I am trying to do with this blog is help improve the signal to noise ratio of discussions about, say, cryonics and longevity medicine and related topics.
Hence, invoking "information uploading" in this context is not going to slip by transparently. Obviously there are going to be physical trauma issues to account for in trying to vitrify brains in a minimally-destructive manner, but frankly these days whenever I see terms like "uploading" my brain immediately parses them as "magic pixie dust".
Imagination is a wonderful thing, I love science fiction, and I know that pretty much every idea starts out on the fringes, so to speak. But I'm not giving out free pixie-dust passes here. And I think it's a worthwhile and even critical exercise to learn to see how many degrees of separation from reality a given idea exhibits.
For example, I would say that given the existing successes in vitrifying/devitrifying rabbit kidneys, and given the fact that some humans have surivived periods in excess of an hour in a state of cold circulatory arrest (such as after falling into an icy lake), the idea of vitrifying a mammal's brain and then at some point being able to revive that mammal looks maybe two degrees away from concrete reality.
But when it comes to an idea like "uploading", we're closer to several hundred degrees away from concrete reality. Yes, we have things like cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by a person's brain, and we've got those chips that run on rat neurons -- but we don't know nearly enough about neurobiology or what "selves" and "minds" are on a physical/phenomenological level to exist to justify claiming any of these things will or can inevitably lead to "uploaded consciousness".
Mind you, I think the idea of "mind uploading" is fascinating, from a philosophical standpoint. I like reading about that stuff in science fiction, and I like reading thought experiments about it so long as they're qualified as thought experiments or similar. I don't think it should be a "banned topic", I just think it has its place (science fiction, speculative philosophy), and that trying to force it into other places when it hasn't justified its presence there is counter-productive.
No worries Anne, I don't take your response personally at all. I too, am not a Neurobiologist. And I respect that you seek to improve "the signal to noise ratio" on this blog regarding these sorts of topics. It seems increasingly difficult to avoid the "pitfalls" you mention in this regard, as both the lines between science and science fiction, and what is possible/impossible are increasingly blurred. So, I can see the difficulty and the necessity of paying careful attention when attempting to make those distinctions. That being said, I was not attempting to force "mind uploading" into the equation. And perhaps it's worth noting that I only meant to use that concept as a filler for what I find to be one of the fuzzier components of what I was attempting to imagine. I didn't understand that to be counterproductive at the time.
All seriousness aside for a moment, I found this entertaining:
Anne wrote: "Hence, invoking "information uploading" in this context is not going to slip by transparently.
When I was trying to describe what I was imagining as a possible avenue to the success of cryogenically freezing an entire body, I was also trying to process information having to do with the complexities of the mind.. And admittedly, I did try to condense the description I was giving. Someone once said that, "It is my intention to say in a sentence, what others say in a book." While I do not always share those sentiments, but for various reasons I decided to in this case. I hope this has added some degree of clarity (all above).
If I may, I'd like to revisit my original thoughts on the subject. Ok, so if it's possible to use cryo on a body, and some other process for the mind, then the first obvious question might be about how to isolate the mind from the body's cryogenic freezing. Maybe using nanobots to perform the task of regulating heat/cold transfer would work. Or maybe something a little more low-tech would work, like using a technique similar to acupuncture (UV) to stop the freezing where you would want it. Any other ideas?
As for striking a balance between cellular regeneration/destruction, and attempting to minimize information loss.. If Karl Lashley, as quoted, was correct, then information retention might be something of an automated process with the newly regenerated cells reacting with the older ones around them.
I realize that there are technologies/procedures here that are still in the developmental phase, but does this count as more "concrete?"
Hi Anne - you said: "I've heard people describing an individual consciousness as something like a "wave function" before, and suggesting that when the "wave function" collapses, the person is gone forever -- is that anything like what you mean?"
We are getting into the technicalities of an idiosyncratic quantum-mind theory here. But to go back to first principles - a quantum wavefunction is very much like a probability distribution, except that it involves complex numbers, and the empirical probabilities are derived from those (square of the absolute value). Also, you have complementarity / the uncertainty principle. In ordinary probability distributions, if you had two properties like position and momentum, you would have probabilities that were a function of those two variables. But in quantum theory, when the two quantities are "complementary" (i.e. subject to the uncertainty principle), you have a single-variable wavefunction doing double duty via a Fourier transform: psi(x), a complex-valued function of position alone, transforms to psi'(p), a complex-valued function of momentum alone. It's the ways in which the actual mathematical apparatus of quantum theory differs from straightforward probability theory (while still yielding calculable empirical probabilities) which make its ontological meaning so hard to decipher.
But apart from all that, a wavefunction is very much like a probability distribution. And just as you can have a joint probability distribution for two or more things, you can have joint wavefunctions, e.g. for two or more particles. And the entanglement to which I referred exists when the joint wavefunction is not a straightforward product of independent single-particle wavefunctions.
At one level the "collapse of the wavefunction" is nothing more than the quantum counterpart to the "collapse of the probability distribution" which occurs upon observation. You roll a die, before you look each face has equal, one-in-six odds of coming up; you look and you see a 5, and now the distribution is concentrated on "5" with probability 100%. You would not normally suppose that the die was in some fuzzy intermediate state until you looked.
But because of the formal peculiarities of quantum probabilities, and because of the general failure to find an underlying theory in which the states of things are completely specified, people adopt unusual attitudes towards wavefunctions. For example, there is a school of thought which says the wavefunction is the state of the object, rather than (as is a probability distribution) a description of your own limited knowledge. Now consider the situation with the die, where you looked and saw the 5, and the probability distribution changed from smooth to peaked. That is the original "collapse of the wavefunction". Originally it referred to the purely formal adjustment to the wavefunction required when a measurement produced definite information, but "wavefunction realists" took it to be a jump in the actual state of the quantum object.
The more notorious form of collapse realism is the dualist sort which says there is a matter-independent mind observing reality and driving these wavefunction jumps. This is a view which appeals to mystics and psychics but which has nothing going for it empirically except the ongoing failure to derive quantum mechanics from something more fundamental. Then you have the spontaneous collapse theorists, who think it happens randomly at a certain frequency, and not just when a 'measurement' happens; but it happens naturally with the right frequency to give the measurement outcomes we see. And finally you have the decoherence theorists, who point out quite correctly that natural quantum dynamics will take a quantum system interacting with a measurement device (itself modelled quantumly), and evolve their mutually entangled state into one that is dominated by a sum of product wavefunctions of the form (object in state 1, instrument seeing state 1) + (object in state 2, instrument seeing state 2) + ...; with the bad outcomes like (object in state 9, instrument seeing state 598) having very low probability. So there is a natural dynamic which produces something akin to a "collapse", namely a correlation between the observed object's probabilities and the observer's probabilities. But at this point we face the problem that the observer is not in a sum of states, they are in one or the other state. Here the interpretive battle, between many-worlders and other approaches, returns.
I am perhaps saying too much but I'm just trying to give some background for understanding what others may mean when they talk of wavefunction collapse in the brain. The usual suspects in this case would be the consciousness-causes-collapse dualists, the modern Cartesians who think the immaterial observing consciousness collapses the wavefunction in the brain in certain ways, and then it's materialistic determinism everywhere else, albeit in a probabilistic mode. That's a pretty silly model, I think.
Actually, returning to your actual quote - if someone said that the person disappears when the wavefunction collapses, that's probably a layperson's fuzzy metaphysical reinterpretation of such ideas, and so even further from anything based in reality.
Now, to finally try to explain what I was going on about... I am advocating a form of wavefunction realism - i.e. the wavefunction itself is the state of the object, not just an index of probabilities. Ultimately, the whole universe has a single wavefunction, the entangled sum of wavefunctions for all the individual particles. Since an entangled wavefunction cannot be factorized into several distinct wavefunctions, I propose that we take entanglement as defining the actual ontological grain of the universe: you try to factorize the universal wavefunction, and the bits that are unfactorizable are the truly elementary entities, even if some have two-component states and others have two-million-component states. It's the latter sort which I would seek to identify with the conscious mind.
This is going to require a basic rewriting of physical ontology for two reasons. First, at present everyone tries to break things down into a bottom level where the elementary things have the same internal complexity - e.g. "particles". Second, the purely mathematical formalism needs to be reinterpreted so that it is about the qualities that make up consciousness, at least in the case of the two-million-degrees-of-freedom object. That second step is "philosophical" - ontological - rather than mathematical, but the first one is largely a matter of mathematics. There is a technical problem, namely that the universe as a whole may appear to be completely unfactorizable, so by the entanglement criterion of identity, there's only one thing. As much as modern physics-fans love that sort of perspective, I don't want to go there, I'm looking for a middle road between particle-based reductionism and cosmic monism. And there are ways around it (see: "quantum causal histories" in the literature).
I don't know how much clearer that makes things. I am not particularly optimistic that my ideas are right, more that they are a fruitful path to explore, one that may lead to truer and subtler ideas about how it all fits together.
AnneC, if you haven't already happened upon this podcast I highly recommend it: "This American Life" episode 354: Mistakes Were Made. It's a story about the early days of cryonics.
I remember as a young man first exposed to the theories of Cryonics, how Walt Disney, had been frozen, and would be someday revived. I had no doubts that one day science would find the solution to create this outcome. It even in some ways felt rightly possible from a spiritual believe, as a JW in my young, some of us would live a thousand years after armaggaden. Over the years, growing up, and being fascinated with the possibility, and realities of sciencific discovery, I recognize that Cryonics is not just wishful thinking, but scientifically probable. But, today, after reading the writing of Ray Kurzweil and others, having some glimpse into the possibilities of nanotech technologies that are coming, perhaps Cryonics will be replaced with a newer, more efficient means to the promise. Are the coming super computers, super scanners, going to be able to replicate me at any moment where death is intimate???
Post a Comment