Who can be bothered with this nonsense?
I remember reading something Eric Drexler wrote were he proudly claimed that no one has ever disproved his ideas on molecular nanotechnology and that this means that his ideas are feasible. Don’t be fooled by this argument.
The main reason that no scientist has disproved him is that none of us can be bothered to do so. We have much better things to do with our time like write papers or research proposals or spend time with friends and family. Anyone who has ever had to prepare a TEM specimen intuitively knows that Drexler’s ideas are nonsense and doesn’t have to go through the ordeal of actually addressing them in detail.
However, I promise to do so one of these days. Ugh…
Can you explain how the existence of living organisms doesn't validate Drexler's ideas? All he is really talking about are artificial, programmable ribosomes.
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I'll take a crack Michael. For one thing the ribosome in nature is made up of biomolecules only and works with biomolecules only and works in watery environment within physiological temperatures only. That the ribosome, a natural molecular machine can do some constructive things, is a brute fact, generalising from that brute fact that other machines can be made that will be programmable and work not just on biomolecules in watery environments and physiological temperatures is a completely unjustified overgeneralisation. It is wishful thinking, not logic, to overgeneralise like that. Can it be fairly said that biology uses molecular machines of a nano-scale? Yes. But they are not magical machines that work with any material at any scale, they are machines that work within the constraints of physics and chemisty. Biologists are still learning some of those constraints with respect to machines like ribosomes. We don't know all there is to know about them. When the drexlerians use biology as an argument that drexlerian nanotechnology can work, they ignore that at the nanoscale mainstream science is still discovering how the molecular machinery of the cell works. Great progress has been made, but we cannot yet provide a full working parts list for even a biological cell. That being the case, neither can the Drexlerians.
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M.A.: "Can you explain how the existence of living organisms doesn't validate Drexler's ideas? All he is really talking about are artificial, programmable ribosomes."
Drexler isn't claiming here that the existence of living organisms means that the era of nanotechnology (in the "robust" Drexlerian sense of human specified and controlled, replicative molecular manufacturing) has already arrived does he? That's surely the force of the "artificial" in your own formulation of this point.
The gap between actually existing organisms and desired Drexlerian nanotechnologies is the same gap that distinguishes this analogy from a valid deduction. The blog post's stated point was that "Eric Drexler... proudly claimed that no one has ever disproved his ideas on molecular nanotechnology and that this means that his ideas are feasible."
I don't see the link to this comment, and I would like one. I may personally find Eric Drexler more worthy of serious consideration in some respects than the author of this blog does, but I share his perfectly proper disdain for techno-utopian handwaving transhumanism in its nanosantalogical variation (among others).
Be that as it may, if Drexler made an argument of the form cited in this blog post, then that is a straightforward example of the fallacy ad ignorantium (sorry to be a pedant), and I daresay even partisans for Drexlerian nanotechnology would strongly prefer arguments of his that aren't fallacious in this way.
As a side note, I think it is interesting how techno-utopians often seem to treat philosophical arguments by analogy that properly function to illuminate incredibly broad theses, as if they likewise constitute arguments demonstrating practical viability, or even inevitability, or even the technodevelopmental imminence of some superlative technology they are enthused about.
Thus polemicists for the Strong Program of Artificial Intelligence regularly seem to leap from the reasonable enough philosophical notion that [1] if human consciousness is not supernatural it should be susceptible in principle to instrumentally adequate scientifically warrented description, to the radically different idea that [2] within 20 years (a time-frame thus far always deferred yet curiously never revoked with each failed prediction) human beings will have overcome all the practical, theoretical, and sociopolitical hurdles that currently frustrate the project to create artificial intelligence.
As with the gap between living organisms and Drexlerian nanotech (not to mention the fantasies of a circumvention of the abiding political barriers to utopian, often libertopian, construals of abundance that characterize much nanosantalogical discourse), hype-notized handwavers tend to discover that the historical, infrastructural, political, cultural complexities, as well as the caveats that freight real-world lab results, frustrate the superlative formulations that might seem logically compatible with general proof of concept.
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Ralph Merkle states in the Afterword of Nanomedicine Volume 1: Basic Capabilities (1999), that "Nanosystems was published in 1992, and no significant flaws have been found. Given the volume of public debate and the number of people who have read the book, the simplest explanation for this absence of reported errors is that the logic is basically correct and its conclusions are basically sound".
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I've noticed that cryonics organizations have started to dissociate cryonics from ideas about uninvented nanotechnologies. The recent conference, Advances in Human Cryopreservation, explicitly stated in its brochure:
http://www.suspendedinc.com/conference/SA_conference.pdf
"We will provide information about the most ambitious research plan
in the history of cryobiology, describing stage one of an unprecedented
effort to achieve reversible whole-body vitrification without the need
for cell repair via nanotechnology."
They probably got tired of Ralph Merkle giving the same nanotech-will-save-us speech he gave 15 years ago.
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In my opinion the driver behind some peoples interest in cryonics is the same as the driver behind most peoples interest in achieving an afterlife through a suspension of what they understand as the normal laws of life.
The driver is simply that individual humans don't generally want to just die. They want to live. They want to live more than they want to be intellectually correct (hence they'll tolerate a great deal of wishful thinking in their own worldviews). So why they live they will find ways to hope they they will continue to live even after death. Its a sort of psychological crutch. The cryonicists don't seem to accept the crutch offered by religious mystics as psychologically satisfying but they still don't want to personally just die when they die.
Human beings are composed of cells and their brains, their personalities and memories are composed of inter and intracellular components. We are natural biological phenomenon all the way from the scale of a couple of metres tall (give or take) to the nanoscale of our biomolecular constituents. That's mainstream science. But we are not designed phenomena. The brains we have are the people we are. Cryonicsts are right I think in recognizing that (those that think about it). They are wrong I think in thinking that we can recreate frozen brains into working brains producing the same personalities from preserved snapshots.
Each human brain in a living human is a massively (though not infinitely) complicated consequence of a human genome moving through a massively interactive human environment. And because the environment each of us lived through is a co-creator of our brain with our genome each of us is inevitably, though undesignedly, unique.
And in part that is why cryonics reconstructive scenarios are so infeasible. One's brain is one's brain, it has its unique structure as a result of one's lived experiences. The difference between two human brains even the brains of identical twins with different life experiences will be different at the nanoscale where the synaptic connections are made. Recreating that structure exactly would require at very least scanning that structure exactly to the requisite scale. And then recreating that structure. The recreation process can't be undirected growth like the first time through as there is a very exact target.
Even if a brain made out of biomolecules could be constructed by an outside in manufacturing process as opposed to an undirected inside out growing process the degrees of precision required to make an exact copy of a human brain from a perfect copy would be ridiculously expensive.
One human brain (even call that brain Albert Einstein) isn't sufficiently important to justify the expense of (rather the opportunity cost of) getting it back as opposed to the expense of getting back what that brain did for human culture or improving upon what that brain was valued as having done by the living brains that would have to make allocation decision
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