Cold Brains

The idea is freezing the mind after death to preserve the information, so that the entirety may be retrieved mumblemumble years in the future. Immortality, folks, or at least as close as we can get.

This is not a kooky idea. For realsies. The logic builds from solid premises to reach a strange, but solid conclusion. People don't want to die. They tend to go to great lengths at the end of their lives to postpone death. There's a drug with horrific side-effects developed here in Japan to help with liver cancer. It costs $100,000 for a year's dose. Patients who take the drug live, on average, two months longer than the control. Two months.

Anyone willing to take that drug, or endure any number of other advanced resource-intensive medical techniques to try to live longer, should be more than willing to roll the dice on freezing their brain.

The logic is entirely straight-forward.

1) Biological information is now safe during the modern freezing process.

Water expands. When you freeze a typical cell, the water inside that cell expands to destroy the cell. In the brain, you're talking about destroying neurons, displacing their data position, or whatever. That is, you're talking about destroying the information that makes us who we are.

But modern techniques can, it seems, drain the water and replace it with safer cryoprotectants that will help prevent tissue damage. I'm obviously not an expert on this, and the only info I have on these cryoprotectants is from pro-cryonics peeps, but I see no overwhelming reason to doubt this. I would say this might be a safe assumption. Even after traditional death, freezing could be able to indefinitely preserve all the things that make you you.

2) If the information is there, then it can (eventually) be retrieved.

Plain logic here.

It doesn't matter what our technology is like today, or next year, or even a century down the line. If technology continues to improve, then eventually, one day, the information will be retrievable.

3) If the information is retrieved, then the person can (eventually) be rebuilt.

This is as true as the last step, it would just take longer. You make the simple assumption that technology will continue to improve. Give it one millennium. Two. Ten. Doesn't matter, as long as engineering doesn't stop.

I happen to think a new strain of the flu will destroy roughly a third of the world's population at some point, but that doesn't necessarily have to happen. And the math is clear: the expected value of a low-probability event is still amazingly high if the outcome is awesome enough. The logic still holds on this one.

The people who advocate cryonics also tend to believe in a technological Singularity, which means they think the progress will be faster than that. But you don't even need that. You don't need a superbrain AI on this, which is good, because there is utterly no way of knowing the probability of it happening soon. As long as scientists keep doing their thing for long enough, and it is within the realm of possibility that they'll keep doing their thing long enough.

4) If a future society has the tech to rebuild people from information, then people are effectively immortal.

DNA's interaction with the bodily processor is a process which can be understood. The answer is there, we just haven't figured it out yet. Aging is a process which can be understood. The answer is there, we just haven't figured it out yet.

We could eventually figure these things out. Let's not futz about. This is totally possible if the swine-bird-croc flu hasn't killed so many of us that we forget to keep the containers cool. As long as that stays the same, we can still rebuild and get back on course. Long odds, sure, but not utterly impossible odds. It is within possibility that we will one day understand human biology in near enough its totality. And if we can do that, medicine will be about living indefinitely, instead of living to 76 and then dying of cancer.

5) Dying is bad.

The moral element.

Look at the liver medicine. The national insurance in the UK declined to offer it, citing its high costs and low benefits. Not every country made the same choice. Japan uses it. Patients in Japan who want to undergo the agony for an average of two extra months are allowed to do so. The national insurances pays for it.

And how much does cryonics cost? A pittance, in comparison. If you are insurable, you can sign up for $300 a year (plus corpse transport expenses). Even if you lived a hundred years, your cost would be $30,000 for a shot of immortality. The lifetime fees for this are less than four months dosage of some ludicrously expensive medications which don't really work that well and yet which people still are willing to take.

6) Do the god damn math.

"Shut up and multiply", as some of the rationality-ists like to say. It's a simple equation. We spend vastly more to extend our lives all the damn time, to little noticeable effect, than this technique is slated to cost, when this technique gives a chance of the forever.

I talked about cryonics before, a little bit. I said, "I don't have anything to say about that." That has changed.

The math is clear on this, in an if-then sort of way.  If a government deems it worthwhile to pay $100,000 a year for liver cancer medication, then they should also pay for brain storage. If a patient is willing to take a medicine worth that much money, with so little chance of success, then they should also be signed up for the cold sleep, with a similarly low probability but a mind-blowingly amazing pay-off if it works out.

Personally, I'm not convinced that either is an ethical choice. I have some small problem with resources being devoted indefinitely to technological tombs of super-cooled dormant minds, while breathing people go without those resources. I also have some small problem with a medication that drains the public treasury, with so little benefit to longevity and so low a quality of life in the duration. I also don't really see why an immortal future has to be filled with 21st century folks, woken from their information-only comas, when it can just as easily be filled with young folks born themselves in the future. Even with killer tech, there's a limit to resources. If people are immortal, that's when an eventual limit on new children has to come into place. Why eat up future resources with those of us who already lived and died (or sort of died), rather than having one last glorious round of baby making before we call it quits on new humans? Why does the potential life of the informationally preserved have dibs over the potential life of brand new young'uns?

So there it stands. I see the logic: it is a genuine possibility. Yet I remain iffy on the morality of this sort of indefinite resource allocation.

This is because I'm crazy. I don't work like normal people. The thing that has finally clicked for me is that anyone who accepts the standard try-everything-to-live-a-little-longer mode of medicine should absolutely be in favor of this.

To be fair: I don't know if this is standard thinking. But it sure seems so. This essay on How Doctors Die says that they do it differently. They die differently. Maybe this isn't true, but it's definitely the impression that I get. All I can say is that I would personally be uncomfortable in accepting any resources to indefinitely extend my own life, if I believed those resources could exceed my own previous contributions, or even come close. I wouldn't be comfortable living as an indefinite dependent. Cryonics is as indefinite as it gets.

You're taking a chance with our future resources. That's the point. But society today seems to enjoy taking these chances, whenever possible. I believe most people -- not everyone, but most people -- would take their chance with the horrible liver medication to squeeze out another few months. And I think most people, if they want to use consistent criteria for judgment, should go ahead and take a chance with the brain freeze.

The idea seems kooky at first blush, but it shouldn't. Based on the ways we as a group approach death and the future --  equivalent concepts on a long-enough time scale -- the majority of people should logically be buying cold crypts. They choose against this, not because they're queasy about indefinite dependency, as I am, but because they haven't thought about it in any depth.

You could add comfortable delusion to the mix, as well. If you expect a soft landing afterward -- and if you're an enthusiastic member of a team that is obligated to furiously wave the flag about how nice and soft that landing will be -- then you're not necessarily going to be thinking carefully about the plausible (though perhaps not probable) outcomes of future technological progress.

Here's the thing that could shift me personally from being uncomfortable with cryonics to accepting it: If a cryonic society were a happy society.

If people in general were comforted by the idea, then the point would be their own well-being. I don't like the idea of indefinite dependence, which strikes me as so much parasitism, but if living, breathing, suffering people out there were so comforted by the existence of this potential backup that they willingly coughed up the cash to preserve these strange crypts, then... that would be okay. Keeping the data of 21st century types intact would not seem a good investment to me on its own, since new human data can be made so easily. But for the peace-of-mind of those presently living? For the peace-of-mind of those who willingly offer up their resources in favor of this idea? That would push the scales for me, in favor of cryonics.

Which doesn't lead to any conclusion at all, because I don't have any idea if a cryonic society would be a happier society.