If a person is cryopreserved, how likely is it that they will be revived?

Question

Also, what factors are most likely to prevent it?

Answer 1

Also, consciousness is not a completely understood phenomenon. Without that understanding, it's possible that it requires more than what is provided by current cryopreservation techniques to restore.

As an analogy: a "cryopreserved" computer might be structurally and electrically reconstructed perfectly, but you didn't save the magnetic fields in the hard drives or the electric fields in the RAM, so you can't really restore the computer completely if you didn't know you had to save that stuff too.

The wikipedia article is intended to just give a starting point as to what I meant by consciousness, as opposed to the typical colloquial usage. It's difficult to link to thorough, one-stop citations about the science of consciousness exactly because it's not well-understood and still a huge topic of current research. However, here are some representative links to recent and current research on consciousness to demonstrate this, and also in case they are helpful for someone who'd like to read more about the current state of things:

• University of Arizona -- Center for Conciousness Archive
• Caltech -- Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Publication Search
• British Psychological Society Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section

Answer 2

There's a post on Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson that gives a decent overview of everything that needs to go right for somebody to be revived:

1. Civilization still exists and has kept growing in technical capability.
2. Your cryonics org and it successors have kept you continuously frozen.
3. Someone is willing and allowed to pay modest costs to revive you.
4. Brain science has workable input/output models of relevant brain cell types.
5. Usual freezing quality preserved relevant model-needed details.
6. Cheap scanning tech slices & 2D scans brains at model-needed spatial, chem resolution.
7. Error correction codes reconstruct most connections across slices, fractures.
8. Cheap computers can real-time sim entire scanned sets of connected cells.
9. Sim life seems worth living enough that they don't prefer suicide.
10. Such sims of you are as worthy as your kid of your identifying with them.

This is talking about being 'revived' and running on non-original hardware (for want of a better term) but I think this has a better chance of working than tring to re-use the origonal 'hardware'.

I don't think anyone will be able to give a probability that it will work, becuase there's too many unkown varibiables. A better way to look at it would be is the cost (which is often covered by life insurance) worth the possible benefit for you, or would you rather spend that money on something else?

Also, "Suspended Animation" looks like it may be used for humans in some medical situations pretty soon. It's already used for individual organs, so providing there's nothing 'magic' about organs like the brain (and we haven't seen any evidence that their is), then in principle it should be possible to use it for all the organs at the same time. If we can achieve this in practice is another matter, and will depend on the technology in the future.