X-Message-Number: 13224
From: "john grigg" <>
Subject: cryonics feasibility...
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 12:13:22 PST

Hello everyone,

The debate continues!  Robert Bradbury brought up the usual points about how 
nanotech should handle just about any damage to cryonically suspended brains 
with current methods but Eugene Leitl's response shows possible reason for 
doubt.

Leitl says he is in the process of doing some detective work of his own, "I 
am in the process of scanning some EM slides, depicting neurotissue damage 
occuring on all scales (forget about microns), both in the typical cryonics 
patient, and the unrealistic best case (rabbit vitrification/controls). 
After I get some people (F*hy, Darwin) to write interpretations of these, 
I'll put them online, for your edification/little screams of horror."  John 
Clarke in a post brings up the important point of whether or not these 
slides are of frozen tissue or tissue that has been thawed.

I look forward to his report.


sincerely,

John Grigg


Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 09:29:22 -0800 (PST)
From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <>
Subject: Re: The feasibility and future of cryonics...
On Sun, 6 Feb 2000, john grigg wrote:
>I still am amazed how being a transhumanist does not automatically mean 
>that
>one is a cryonicist.  I realize the techniques must be improved but with
>proper financial backing they will get there.  Already, the 21st Century
>Medicine breakthroughs will make cryonics infinitely more likely to get us
>to the future we dream about.
John, without meaning to throw a wet blanket on your enthusiasm and
fully acknowledging Saul and Greg's efforts, I will state quite strongly
that progress in the suspension technologies are largely irrelevant
(though the spin-offs will make good business investments).  [Yes,
Eugene, I know you will disagree with me....]
Most cryonicists are working off of the fundamental perspective that
was valid 15 years ago, namely you had to freeze your tissue and
unfreeze it while sustaining little damage.  If you really really
understand nanotech capabilities, that perspective has to shift.
The only real question is whether or not the freezing process causes
a unrecoverable loss of information.  I would argue that with the
information handling capacity and sensing capabilities we can expect
to have (in large part due to nanotech) in 20-30 years, will make
*any* damage that occurs during freezing largely irrelevant.
I get the feeling that most cryonicists are existing in the middle
ground currently of wanting to minimize the damage so nanotech
has as little as possible to clean up.  That seems really pretty
ridiculous however.  Go buy yourself a 1000+ piece 3D jigsaw
puzzle and assemble it.  If you work on it long enough (3-4 days)
you *will* get it to go together.  I'd argue that nanotech could
probably do the reassembly job even after a fair fraction
of your brain has been "crushed" (think of the octapus squeezing
its brain through very small spaces with no ill effects).
So long as you don't physically destroy the information content
I cannot see how nanotech would not be able, given enough time,
to put things back together.  Hal and many others may believe that
freezing destroys some of the information content.  I remain unconvinced.
Hot news for the day: IBM announces 3-4 GHz processors should
be available in 3-4 years.  I'll simply note that this is
more than *DOUBLE* the rate projected in the SIA roadmap!
Step by step, the singularity (picture the big Rock Creature
from Galaxy Quest) takes huge strides down the Texas highway....Robert

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 18:55:39 -0800 (PST)
From: Eugene Leitl <>
Subject: Re: CRYONICS: feasibility [was Re: Fox cryonics show]
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes:
 > Forget the problem of repairing the brain.  Think of it in uploading
 > terms.  The theoretical question is:  "If you know where every single
Both contexts do not differ too much. (Provided, you are essentially
unrestricted in your ability to do repairs at molecular scale, and in
your ability to kickstart a reconstructed organism. If you are, then
uploading wins house high. There are no such obvious restrictions on
complexity of bit twiddling. Digital filters can be made to do
anything doable, and numerical crunch is truly cheap if you have
computronium computronium, especially if processing time is of little
significance).
 > atom in a frozen brain lies, could you extract an model of the brain's
 > operation with such high resolution that the informational damage caused
 > by freezing would not be significant (on a damage scale calibrated by
 > the effects of neural death and quantum/thermal randomness in day-to-day
 > operation)?"  I think this sounds reasonable; damage to structure on the
This assumes that scrambling/degradation introduced by the
freezing/vitrification has a subthreshold (loosely defined) inflatory
effect on the size of the target area in persona space you're trying
to reconstruct.That information is irreclaimably destroyed, thus introducing
uncertainty into/removing constraints from the to-be-reconstructed
persona space, is not open to doubt. It's still debatable, however,
how many bits actually go into the big bitbucket in the sky. Is it
enough, that the amount of constraints left indicate more that merely
that you've been a human?
 > >10^6-atom-scale may appear to destroy the information contained on that
 > level of abstraction, but the same information should still be
 > obtainable from the internal structure of the mostly-untouched inner
 > volumes of the 10^6-atom units being shoved around.  If so, then the
You're guessing here. You optimistically assume that the mind is
pretty engramic/holographic, and ubiquitous but limited-scale damage
just degrades your hologram very slightly. Try running your
interference fringes through an FFT, then a high-frequency filter and
inverse FFT, then see how your hologram looks like.
 > practical question is extracting the information without causing exactly
 > the sort of atomic-scale disruption that would destroy that level of
 > abstraction as well.
I am in the process of scanning some EM slides, depicting neurotissue
damage occuring on all scales (forget about microns), both in the
typical cryonics patient, and the unrealistic best case (rabbit
vitrification/controls). After I get some people (F*hy, Darwin) to
write interpretations of these, I'll put them online, for your
edification/little screams of horror.
While there will be still copious room for denial, at least we can
then restrict proliferation of pure fabrication.

Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 01:03:25 -0500From: "John Clark" 
<>
Subject: Re: CRYONICS: feasibility
Eugene Leitl <> Wrote:
    >I am in the process of scanning some EM slides, depicting neurotissue
    >damage occuring on all scales (forget about microns), both in the 
typica
    >l cryonics patient, and the unrealistic best case (rabbit
vitrification/controls).
Are the they pictures of frozen tissue or frozen tissue that has been 
thawed?
There is an important difference.         John K Clark
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