Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

New York Times Features Robin Hanson and the “Hostile Wife Phenomenon” in Cryonics

I really didn't think the mainstream could possibly care much about this issue, but the New York Times seems to be jumping all over our small community, so now we get the amusement of seeing our internal issues get hashed out in front of everyone. Yay.

From "Until Cryonics Do Us Part":

Robin is the kind of nerd who is very excited about the future, an orientation evident on his C.V., which lists published articles like “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence” (on why robots will give us growth rates “an order of magnitude” higher than we’ve currently got), “Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies of Interstellar Colonization” (on what behaviors we can expect from extraterrestrials) and “Drift-Diffusion in Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics” (it’s very complicated). His enthusiasm is evident in the way he talks about these ideas, hands in the air, laughing amiably every time he brings up the distance between his own theories and those of the mainstream. If he is in a chair, the chair is moving with him.

Nice personality profile. I noticed that there was one glaring error in the article regarding the process of cryonics... it claims that your brain is surgically removed after metabolism ceases, but it's really the head. This is an important distinction. You'd think that reporters writing an article on cryonics would at least read the damn Alcor web page for ten minutes and get that right.

The original paper, "Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics" goes into more depth if you're interested. My explanation for the phenomenon is pretty simple: gender differences in enthusiasm towards science. I predict that more women will come to appreciate science when more technologies are developed that focus on the empathic nuances of human communication. We already see this to some extent with things like SecondLife, though that may be a bad example due to its particular idiosyncrasies. If you disagree with me, feel free to say so in the comments, but please hold the accusations of sexism (towards me or otherwise), as that will poison any opportunity for actual discussion.

Yes, I know it's verboten to ever mention any differences between men and women, but keep in mind that many of the differences have to do with attitudes that are only skin-deep, and more or less chosen. (Though there are definitely differences that seem to center around the specific adaptive problems men and women were invented by evolution to solve.) I think that the only way gender relations can be improved is by analyzing the differences between (the average of) men and (the average of) women and trying to reconcile them, rather than ignoring said differences.

Anyway, for Robin Hanson's personal justification of why he thinks being frozen and eventually uploaded will work, see "Philosophy Kills".

Alcor Job Opportunities

There are still several job openings at Alcor, and qualified parties should consider applying. These openings include Chief Executive Officer, Technical Coordinator, and Readiness Coordinator at Alcor's Scottsdale Facility. There is also a need for licensed paramedics and emergency medical technicians for contract work in California, Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Consider sending in your resume, and help contribute to an appreciative cryonics community.

Cryonics Will Scare Your Head Off

Annalee Newitz apparently thinks cryonics is creepy.

Her favorite comment on the photo collection of dewars (scary!) was this articulate one:

Profound.

Question: is cryonics any more "creepy" than what we already do with bodies where metabolism has ceased?

Human beings are largely unaware about the gruesome nature of “death”.

Humans also shy away from the mutilation that occurs during hospital surgery.

Hollywood films portray cryonics in a glamorous high-tech manner that makes it appear that one’s body can easily be placed into a capsule and frozen for future revival.

Reality is that cryopreservation involves complex surgery whereby tubes are inserted into major arteries and veins in order to deliver special anti-freeze solutions into the brain. The purpose is to reduce or eliminate freezing damage and other types of damage to brain cells. The process involves introducing stabilizing drugs and a special solution in the field and a major procedure in an operating room.

There’s nothing pretty about human cryopreservation, but as you’ll read, the alternatives are truly ghastly—and every alternative involves the head eventually separating from the body.

We deceive ourselves

When I worked as a licensed embalmer, I was quite talented at taking horrific human remains and making them look good temporarily. In order to do this, a tremendous amount of mutilation was done to each corpse.

First step is to wire or sew their mouths shut. Incisions are made in the neck, groin and other areas to access arteries to insert tubes that were used to force formaldehyde in. Veins are accessed (raised) to push blood out.

While formaldehyde delivered through blood vessels preserves tissues of the body, it does little to keep cavities (such as the stomach, bowels, lungs and cranium) from putrefying. To keep the body from decomposing before burial, we used a device that resembles a thick hollow sword to repeatedly penetrate the body cavities to vacuum out as much of the liquid contents as possible. We would then reverse the process by pouring formaldehyde directly into the thoracic and abdominal cavities and sometimes the brain. Sometimes the same sword (trocar) used to evacuate the bowels was shoved up the nose through the sinuses to suck out cerebral-spinal fluid in the cranium.

When I learned how to do this in mortuary school, I thought how undignified the entire process is. Without embalming, however, the outcome is even worse.

You know what's creepier than cryonics dewars? That the editor-in-chief of an ostensibly progressive, futurist blog could be so explicitly anti-transhumanist, anti-Singularity, and anti-life extension.

Consider the other side of the story before you condemn cryonics along with Ms. Newitz.

Dr. Brian Wowk: Suspended Animation by Vitrification

This is from the Alcor video gallery.

Ben Best’s Page on Vitrification

Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, has a page on the concept of vitrification, which you should read if you aren't familiar with it. Vitrification allows the cooling of a human body or head to liquid nitrogen temperatures while avoiding the formation of ice crystals, which destroy structure. Ben Best's pages on cryonics are notable for their scientific rigor.

There are a variety of other short essays on cryonics available as well. Also note my post from last year on the concept of intermediate temperature storage.

Alcor’s 93rd and 94th Patients Cryopreserved Back-to-Back

Alcor blog reports the back-to-back cryopreservation of two patients, Chihiro Asaumi and Wesley du Charme.

Asaumi had metastatic breast cancer. Du Charme "was recently diagnosed with end-stage pancreatic cancer after battling brain cancer for an extended period of time". Both of them wisely relocated to Scottsdale (where Alcor's headquarters is located), du Charme just five days prior to his legal death. Du Charme avoided additional treatment at home because "the time required for treatments would only reduce the likelihood he would be well enough for travel". According to Alcor's blog, "The flight was challenging for Wes, given his condition, but he said that getting close to Alcor was worth the effort". Asaumi and du Charme were suspended only 30 hours apart.

I knew du Charme. We met at a Terasem event in Florida, where he gave a lively talk on possible criteria for personhood. He was a sharp, enthusiastic guy and full of life -- I never would've imagined that he was struggling with brain cancer. Du Charme was on the Lifeboat Foundation ethics board and was a Senior Associate of the Foresight Institute. He even wrote a book on life extension and immortalism that was published in 1995. He was truly committed to the causes of cryonics and radical life extension.

Congratulations to Asaumi and du Charme for making the right choice and deciding to get cryopreserved. In a material, non-mystical world where the mind is what the brain does, preserving the structure of the brain is a foremost concern if you care about continuing to exist. My respect goes to Chihiro and Wes for taking this leap into the great unknown. It is our responsibility to keep the world in one piece until we develop the technology necessary for reviving cryonics patients. Remember, death is gruesome... cryonics only make it less so!

Brain Preservation Technology Prize, BrainPreservation.org

Miron Cuperman recently alerted me to a new website, BrainPreservation.org. Here's the homepage text:

I do want to change the world – I want to put an end to death. I want to make it every person’s right to experience the future centuries from now, and to live without the constant fear that aging and crippling disease will take away their joy for life, make them a burden to their loved ones, and strip them of their dignity. We have it within our power today to create that world. Let me say that again, we have it within our power today to create that world. From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.

How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today – the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body – the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.

Given our current state of knowledge it is quite likely that the perfection of a surgical brain-preservation procedure could be accomplished in less than five years with minimal amounts of research funds. However, aside from a few underfunded research groups, no serious brain preservation research is currently being performed. More tragically, even if such a surgical procedure were available today the legal system would prevent its proper use as a life saving measure by preventing it from being administered before the declaration of legal death. The reasons are social and political, and from those standpoints such a world is much harder to reach. It requires large numbers of people to viscerally accept a new metaphor -- a metaphor that the last 150 years of biological science has demonstrated to be accurate -- the metaphor that we are machines.

Amen! The above is not so much a proposal for new technology, as it is a proposal for new attitudes. If I want to preserve my brain now, and "commit suicide" according to the Judeo-Christian-influenced standard meme complex, then I should be allowed to do so. As a transhumanist, I am comfortable with making that statement in public, and wouldn't feel awkward saying so in front of any number of friends or family, if necessary. Transhumanist goals, like the noble one outlined above, are already being held back by coward transhumanists. Transhumanists, say what you believe in public, now, or you aren't having an impact.

It doesn't matter if it's just a Blogspot blog with a single post. Say it.

Another interesting aspect of the site is a proposal for a brain preservation technology prize.

How about a new era, where we can potentially live forever because our neural content is perfectly preserved and ready for reanimation? I don't know about you, but I enjoy being on the right side of history a decade or three in advance. Might as well get on the right side now, rather than jump on the bandwagon when it's being mobbed.

A preserved mind is a beautiful thing. A skull-bowl full of bacterial pudding-mush is not. There is no afterlife -- Heaven is a lie made up by our ancestors to cope with the pain of death.

Rudi Hoffman: Ten Ways to Avoid Being the Next Cryonics Legal Case

Rudi Hoffman is the man to go to for life insurance to fund a cryonics contract. Last I heard, he had cornered about 95% of the market in this small niche. In light of the recent Mary Robbins case, Rudi has written up a list of choices cryonicists can make to ensure that our hostile relatives don't try to pull us out of the freezer, valiantly (according to some people, apparently) making our neural structures available for consumption by a variety of worms and bacteria. Here's the intro:

Several of my clients and friends have asked me for observations regarding securing their cryonics arrangements even with contrary wishes of friends and relatives. Given the recent Mary Robbins case in Colorado, and multiple previous cases available in some detail on the websites of both CI and Alcor, structuring your affairs in the most secure manner currently has top of mind awareness for many who are serious about their cryonics plans.

The purpose of this article is to provide some insight into how serious cryonicists can structure their affairs to assure themselves they have done everything possible regarding funding and legal structures for their optimal suspensions.

I noticed that Rudi missed one thing that several cryonicists have suggested to me: putting a "certificate of religious belief" in your wallet that makes a concrete statement against autopsy for religious reasons. One friend of mine used a lamination machine to attach this directly to his ID. I am especially concerned about this for young cryonicists because I've heard that when a young person dies under circumstances even the slightest bit unusual, autopsies are common.

As soon as blood starts to coagulate, vitrification becomes impossible, seriously reducing the quality of the suspension. Though I am hopeful that even the most primitive suspensions will lead to revivals some day, it casually seems to me (as a non-scientist) that suspensions involving vitrification will require lower levels of technology for a successful revival.

Since I'm on the topic of cryonics, why not quote Ben Franklin:

I have seen an instance of common flies…drown’d in Madeira
wine…Having heard it remark’d that drowned flies were capable of
being reviv’d by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment
upon these; they were therefore expos’d to the sun…In less than three
hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life...and soon after
began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how
they came thither.

I wish it were possible…to invent a method of embalming drown’d
persons, in such a manner that they may be recall’d to life at any
period, however distant. For having a very ardent desire to see and
observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to
any ordinary death, being immers’d in a cask of Madeira wine...to be
later recall’d to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!”

On one occasion, this caused me to remark to Michael Vassar, "do you think there are some people buried in caskets of Madeira wine in the ground that we just haven't discovered yet?", to which he replied, "I doubt it." A pity... I am looking at a quarter right now, and I should think that in the long term, the world would be willing to trade every quarter in circulation (likenesses of Washington) for the actual preserved brain and body of George Washington. Whether he would care to be revived in the present, however, may be a separate question, but if he were, I can only imagine that he would enjoy some level of political influence in US politics.

Legal Victory for Cryonics

There's another media explosion over cryonics, this time having to do with a woman named Mary Robbins. She signed numerous documents indicating she wanted to be cryopreserved at Alcor, then, her family claimed that she changed her mind in her final days. A Colorado court recently ruled in favor of Alcor because no documentation to back up the family's argument was ever produced, as required by Colorado law. Here is the Associated Press coverage. This ruling sets a good precedent. It sometimes seems as if hostile family members are willing to throw away the law to ensure that their relative rots in the ground in lieu of being cryopreserved. Almost as if their soul would be trapped if they were suspended.

It's disappointing how many family members freak out when they find out that their mother/father/relatives are signed up for cryonics and going into cryosuspension. Even if I thought cryonics was complete bunkum, I would at least have the decency to respect the wishes of my relative.

Even if I thought revival from a preserved state were impossible, I would still be sympathetic to cryonics because it is based on the principle of preserving rather than destroying a very valuable object -- the human brain. This leaves open the possibility of future analysis, imaging, and inferences about the person whose brain it was. If my ancestor's brains were preserved, there would come a day where it could be possible to analyze them non-invasively and maybe learn something about their neurology. For instance, you might have heard about how blind people acquire a better sense of hearing and vision than everyone else. In the not-too-distant future, it could become possible to scan a brain and determine if someone was blind by the structure of their visual cortex. More and more details would follow as neuroscience progressed, until eventually everything would become determined. The brain, just like everything else in the world, is thoroughly non-mystical.

Preservation is our only window into the past. Imagine the knowledge destroyed when the Library of Alexandria was incinerated. Similar knowledge is destroyed whenever worms and bacteria dissolve a brain, we just don't have all the tools to look at it yet. Surprisingly, many people are still not clear on the acknowledged fact that all our memories, personality, feelings, and inclinations are encoded in the structure and chemistry of our brains. They believe in a separate metaphysical "mind" somehow independent of the brain. But the mind is simply the structure and function of the brain. Even if revival proved impossible in the long term, the preservation of individual brains today could provide a unique window into the past for future generations to analyze, providing a strong argument for its value.

The human brain is the most remarkable known object in the entire universe. Why throw it out like a bit of moldy hamburger? For a very modest cost, the seats of our consciousness can be preserved after our metabolic death. In fact, the technology already exists to destructively scan brains piece-by-piece -- ever heard of ATLUM? This serial sectioning method allows for such precise nanoscale scanning that individual synapses and vesicles are visible using a scanning electron microscope. You can read more about the technology at the brain emulation roadmap. Within a few decades or maybe even less, it will be possible to create a computer file that consists of a nanoscale scan of an entire human brain. It's only a matter of time before scientists learn how to interpret the patterns of such scans as frozen thoughts, memories, personality, and other complex mental features. It may take a while, but hey -- if you're frozen at liquid nitrogen temperature, your neural molecules ain't going anywhere fast.

Job Opportunities at Alcor

Alcor has some job openings, including CEO for $125,000 a year plus benefits. That's a lot of moola.

There's also openings for Technical Coordinator, Readiness Coordinator, paramedics, and emergency technicians.

Come on, people. Those frozen heads aren't going to beat themselves. Let's get to work.

(Apologies if anyone is offended by my little joke. Sometimes I think cryonicists are a little too serious and self-important. Full disclosure: I am Alcor member A-2458.)

Depressed Metabolism: Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics

Mike Darwin, a cryonics figure who led Alcor 1983 to 1988 and acted as Research Director until 1992, apparently kept an eight-year log (1978 to 1986) of incidents where hostile girlfriends or wives "prevented, reduced or reversed the involvement of their male partner in cryonics". In a blog post on Depressed Metabolism, Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics, Darwin and cryonics experts Chana de Wolf and Aschwin de Wolf summarize the phenomenon and the history behind it. They point out that the hostility reaches back to the very dawn of the idea in 1968.

Hostility to cryonics is not always all harmless or in fun: it can lead to divorce or even contribute to accidental death via carbon monoxide poisoning. (See the blog post for details.)

Why are women more traditionally hostile than men to cryonics? I don't think the answer is rocket science: it's just that men are more familiar with, skilled in, and comfortable with technology than women. For better or for worse, that's the average case. This is changing, but still, the average man is more comfortable with technology than the average woman. The flip-side of this, in my eyes, is that women are more likely to express a reasonable degree of skepticism about the ability of new technologies to improve our lives whereas men are more likely to be naively enthusiastic. (Engadget, anyone?)

Thankfully, in my own case, my girlfriend supports cryonics and is signed up for cryonics with me, so I was able to avoid all the nastiness described in the article.