X-Message-Number: 31316
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Bart Kosko's 2009 Edge question essay
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2009 15:00:42 -0800
In answer to: What will change everything?
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_13.html#kosko
BART KOSKO
Information Scientist, USC; Author, Noise
CHEAP CRYONIC SUSPENSION OF BRAINS
Society will change when the poor and middle class have easy access to
cryonic suspension of their cognitive remains - even if the future
technology involved ultimately fails.
Today we
almost always either bury dead brains or burn them. Both disposal
techniques result in irreversible loss of personhood information
because both techniques either slowly or quickly destroy all the brain
tissue that houses a person's unique neural-net circuitry. The result
is a neural information apocalypse and all the denial and superstition
that every culture has evolved to cope with it.
Some future biocomputing technology may extract and thus back-up this
defining neural information or wetware. But no such technology is in
sight despite the steady advances of Moore's Law doubling of transistor
density on computer chips every two years or so. Nor have we cracked
the code of the random pulse train from a single neuron. Hence we are
not even close to making sense of the interlocking pulse trains of the
billions of chattering neurons in a functioning human brain.
So far the only practical alternative to this information catastrophe
is to vitrify the brain and store it indefinitely in liquid nitrogen at
about -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Even the best vitrification techniques
still produce massive cell damage that no current or even medium-term
technology can likely reverse. But the shortcomings of early
twenty-first century science and engineering hardly foreclose the
technology options that will be available in a century and far less so
in a millennium. Suspended brain tissue needs only periodic replacement
of liquid nitrogen to wait out the breakthroughs.
Yet right now there are only about 100 brains suspended in liquid
nitrogen in a world where each day about 150,000 people die.
That comes to fewer than three suspended brains per year since a
40-year-old and post-Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick hailed the promise
of cryonic suspension in his 1968 Playboy interview. Kubrick cast death
as a problem of bioengineering: "Death is no more natural or inevitable
than smallpox or diphtheria. Death is a disease and as susceptible to
cure as any other disease." The Playboy interviewer asked Kubrick if he
was interested in being frozen. Kubrick said that he "would be if there
were adequate facilities available." But just over three decades later
Kubrick opted for the old neural apocalypse when he could easily have
afforded a first-class cryonic suspension in quite adequate facilities.
The Kubrick case shows that dollar cost is just one factor that affects
the ease of mass access to cryonics. Today many people can afford a
brain-only suspension by paying moderate premiums for a life-insurance
policy that would cover the expenses. But almost no one accepts that
cryonics wager. There are also stigma costs from the usual scolds in
the church and in bioethics. There is likewise no shortage of
biologists who will point out that you cannot get back the cow from the
hamburger.
And there remains the simple denial
of the inexorable neural catastrophe. That denial is powerful enough
that it keeps the majority of citizens from engaging in rational estate
planning. The probate code in some states such as California even
allows valid handwritten wills that an adult can pen (but not type) and
sign in minutes and without any witnesses. But only a minority of
Californians ever executes these handwritten wills or the more formal
attested wills. The great majority dies intestate and thus they let the
chips fall where the state says they fall.
So it
is not too surprising that the overwhelming majority of the doomed
believe that the real or imagined transaction costs of brain suspension
outweigh its benefits if they think about the matter at all. But those
costs will only fall as technology marches on ever faster and as the
popular culture adapts to those tech changes. One silver lining of the
numbing parade of comic-book action movies is how naturally the younger
viewing audience tends to embrace the fanciful information and
biotechnology involved in such fare even if the audience lacks a like
enthusiasm for calculus.
Again none of this means
that brain suspension in liquid nitrogen will ever work in the sense
that it leads to some type of future resurrection of the dead. It may
well never work because the required neuro-engineering may eventually
prove too difficult or too expensive or because future social power
groups outlaw the practice or because of many other technical or social
factors. But then again it may work if enough increased demand for such
brain suspensions produces enough economies of scale and spurs enough
technical and business innovation to pull it off. There is plenty of
room for skepticism and variation in all the probability estimates.
But just having an affordable and plausible long shot at some type of
resurrection here on Earth will in time affect popular belief systems
and lengthen consumer time horizons. That will in turn affect risk
profiles and consumption patterns and so society will change and
perhaps abruptly so. A large enough popular demand for brain
suspensions would allow democracies to directly represent some of the
interests from potential far-future generations because no one would
want themselves or their loved ones to revive and find a spoiled
planet. Our present dead-by-100 life spans make it all too easy to
treat the planet like a rental car as we run up the social credit cards
for unborn debtors.
The cryonics long shot lets us
see our pending brain death not as the solipsistic obliteration of our
world but as the dreamless sleep that precedes a very major
surgery.------------------------------------------
"Around 2010 the world will be at a new orbit in history. . . Life expectancy
will be indefinite. Disease and disability will nonexist. Death wll be rare and
accidental -- but not permanent. We will continuously jettison our obsolescence
and grow younger." F.M. Esfandiary, "Up-Wing Priorities" (1981).
Mark Plus
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