Lately I've been perseverating a bit on one of my longtime nerd-interests, cryonics. My first exposure to the idea of chilling and storing bodies for potential later revival happened, as is usually the case, via science fiction. I'd previously been interested in "time machine" sci-fi but "suspended animation" sci-fi had even more of an appeal for me as it entailed not only a sort of travel into the future, but all kinds of weird medical theory and instrumentation. Which was right up my alley, so to speak.
I'm not personally signed up for cryonics in the real world, but somewhere in the back of my mind I've sort of been planning on signing up since high school, or whenever it was I actually learned that real companies did that kind of thing. Recently the discussion came up in real-world terms, though, and I found myself wondering: would I really go through with signing up? Do I think others should sign up? What about my family and loved ones -- is this something I'd recommend to them? And if so, on what basis?
I definitely don't put much stock in it actually working. I suspect that any major medical breakthroughs having to do with arrested metabolism and low-temperature maintenance will probably come from ongoing developments in therapeutic hypothermia and related techniques already in "mainstream", if not widespread, use. But that doesn't mean I don't think it's neat.
However, I've recently found out just how "weird" and even "crackpottish" the idea of cryonics seems to Most People. I actually always saw it as one of the less weird things a person might conceivably find intriguing. But apparently that isn't the case.
I've thought hard about this realization and I've determined that I am not actually worried, in the slightest, about being seen as strange or wacky.
What I am worried about is actually being wackily detached from reality. I've always been determined to face the actual truth no matter how it might make me feel. So I've been trying to figure out if being intrigued by cryonics and considering it every bit as reasonable a choice as, say, having one's ashes shot into space or donating one's body to a medical lab means anything bad about my capacity to evaluate claims or accurately assess reality.
I definitely don't think that the first people suspended will likely be revivable, or that anyone who was dead for two days (give or take) prior to suspension likely has enough brain left to be future-salvageable, but based on my admittedly amateur level of biology-knowledge, it seems at least conceivable that someone suspended right at the point of clinical death, and suspended well, could have a chance of being revived similar to the chances of someone found at the bottom of an icy lake. Is there something I'm missing here science-wise?
Mind you I am not talking about "scanning" brains and "downloading" them into Shiny Robot Bodies -- that's way far off in speculative-land beyond what I think anyone alive today can reasonably do anything but fantasize about. But just...chilling a very-recently-clinically-deceased body, keeping it for a while, then waking it up someday? That just doesn't ping my weird-o-meter very strongly.
And...I guess I'm wondering whether it should. Again, I'm not worried about my "image" here, I'm worried about making sure I don't end up believing anything stupid just because it sounds really cool.
I plan on keeping on reading more about the biology of life, death, and everything in between, so perhaps I'll eventually come to a higher confidence level either way, but still, I'm curious about any particular (non-"futurist", preferably) resources people might want to recommend.
By the same token, I'm wondering if thinking cryonics is conceptually ethically okay (that is, I don't think it's unethical or immoral for a person to choose to sign up for cryonic suspension) means anything awful about my character. Again, this isn't about what I'm worried about being perceived as, but what I'm worried about actually possibly being. I don't want to be a "narcissist" or a pathologically selfish person -- but does being interested in cryonics make me one?
Monday, March 23, 2009
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22 comments:
Anne, thanks again for your many thoughtful essays.
With many of my friends invested in cryonic preservation, I've observed that this belief is correlated with a transparent assumption of nearly infinite value of a self extended nearly infinitely.
On that basis, it's "obvious" that having a small chance at that reward is clearly preferable, even at significant cost. And it's even more "obviously" a smart decision in comparison with the default of passively succumbing to entropy.
But on a basis more coherent over a broader context, when one sees that there is no essential self to be preserved, and that it's increasingly meaningless to attempt to assess expected utility within an open and evolving context of increasing uncertainty, the question reduces to the general case of how best to promote one's present (and evolving) values over an increasing scope of future consequences. And that is always only accomplished in the here and now, mindful of the present value of money (and other resources.)
In more concrete terms: Sure, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of cryonics, and it'll become a better bet with time. But let go of childlike/narcissistic assumptions of nearly infinite payback on behalf of a nearly infinitesimal speck of the universe, and one might see that it's like playing the lottery -- a dollar, or a hundred thousand dollars, applied in the here and now toward *creating* the future one would like to see is a much more rational bet.
[This is of course separate from the present value of a cryonics contract as a vehicle for signaling membership in a particular in-group for purposes of enhanced cooperation, but that's another essay...]
From my e-mail archive:
Subject: Afraid of turning into Liberace
25 April 2001
My latest post to the Extropians:
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> ... Cryonics patients are DEAD....
> The euphemisms are not > fooling
> anyone and I think it sounds darn
> stupid, like > wearing a sign that
> says... "Hi, this is a cult"....
>
> Saying that Alcor has sixty (or
> whatever) "reversibly dead patients"
> is, in itself, a powerful sign that
> cryonics is not cultish or denial
> or an Egyptian mummification sham....
I know it's not PC on this list, and I don't claim that anybody else should feel the same way, but I have a hard time taking cryonics seriously -- not least because it provokes too many humorous associations for me.
For one thing, speaking of Egyptian mummification, there's the altogether too close parallel with the outfit I saw a TV show about a while ago, called Summum:
http://www.summum.org/mummification/
Then there's the whole association in my mind with those aspects of California culture which New Yorkers like Woody Allen have been making fun of for years (and cf. "The Californian Ideology":
http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/
califIdeo_I.html
and the rebuttal by Louis Rossetto, editor of _Wired_:
http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/
califIdeo_II.html )
Woody Allen has also made the serious and somber point, in the comedy _Sleeper_, that the kind of world a cryonaut might wake into, or the purposes for which one might be revived, might not be what ve might wish for prior to cryonic suspension.
One reflection that's crossed my mind that isn't just a matter of media associations is the thought that the nastiest aspect of death for me personally (and probably for many other people) isn't the idea of nonexistence per se, but rather the likelihood of having to go through a fair amount of unpleasantness in order to reach that state. Cryonics doesn't get you around any of that; in fact, if anything, there'd likely enough be a fair amount of unpleasantness at the other end, assuming one got revived (I'd anticipate something at least as bad as the discomfort of being "rebooted" following my phenobarbital suicide attempt 20 years ago).
Of course, the wish to avoid the unpleasantness surrounding death (on whichever side of it) can be written off as mere cowardice; but the belief that one's own personality is important enough to take extreme measures to preserve from nonexistence strikes me as -- unseemly, somehow. Maybe I feel that way for the same reason I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand, and maybe that feeling marks me out as somebody who doesn't **deserve** such perpetuation (that has a satisfyingly Darwinian ring to it!).
Unlike HAL in _2001_, I find nothing particularly alarming in the fact that my consciousness does, in fact, cease to exist every night when I'm in delta sleep. Nor do I find the prospect that the universe will go on for billions of years without me in it particularly alarming. **Strange**, yes, but no stranger than contemplating the fact that the unverse existed for billions of years **before** I came into it, or contemplating the unlikelihood that I should exist at all, or contemplating the fact that the person I was at age 5 or 15 has already almost altogether disappeared, and is only dimly reflected in the person I am now.
In fact, I even get into moods sometimes in which I'm struck by the sheer strangeness of being limited to my own conscious **perspective** on the universe -- I'm overwhelmed by the thought of the sheer **simultaneity** of billions of other human beings going about their business at this exact moment, to say nothing about the trillions upon trillions of other biological organisms on this planet, and the unknown number of organisms, intelligent or otherwise, on other worlds throughout the universe. I mentioned this feeling once in an oddball telephone conversation I was having with a friend many years ago, saying something like "doesn't it ever make you feel **claustrophobic** to be stuck in your own infinitesimal corner of spacetime?", whereupon my friend asked "have you been dropping windowpane acid?" ;->
However, getting back to media influences, the dominant image in my mind when it comes to cryonics has got to be the 1965 film _The Loved One_, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel of the same name:
http://www.amazon.com/Loved-One-Robert-Morse/dp/B000ERVK4O
If I were about to sign a contract in the business office of a cryonics outfit, the anticipation that Liberace might appear at any moment in the proceedings would, no doubt, reduce me to a fit of hysterical giggling. For that matter, I don't think I could ever be certain that I wouldn't wake up to discover that I **was** Liberace (*). ;-> ;-> ;->
Jim F.
(*) or Elvis! ;->
-----------------------
Even though it offers little hope of resurrection, J. G. Ballard's portrayal of a sort of cybernetic version of cryo-preservation in his story _The Time-Tombs_ is far more romantically appealing than the prospect of having one's head preserved in liquid nitrogen at Alcor:
"There were no corpses in the time-tombs, no dusty skeletons. The cyber-architectonic ghosts which haunted them were embalmed in the metallic codes of memory tapes, three-dimensional molecular transcriptions of their living originals, stored among the dunes as a stupendous act of faith, in the hope that one day the physical recreation of the coded personalities would be possible. After five thousand years the attempt had been reluctantly abandoned, but out of respect for the tomb-builders their pavilions were left to take their own hazard with time in the Sea of Vergil...
The furnishings of the tomb differed from that of the previous one. Sombre black marble panels covered the walls, inscribed with strange gold-leaf hieroglyphics, and the inlays in the floor represented stylized astrological symbols, at once eerie and obscure. Shepley leaned against the altar, watching the cone of light reach out towards him from the chancel as the curtains parted. The predominant colours were gold and carmine, mingled with a vivid powdery copper that gradually resolved itself into the huge, harp-like headdress of a reclining woman. She lay in the centre of what seemed to be a sphere of softly luminous gas, inclined against a massive black catafalque, from the sides of which flared two enormous heraldic wings. The woman's copper hair was swept straight back from her forehead, some five or six feet long, and merged with the plumage of her wings, giving her an impression of tremendous contained speed -- like a goddess arrested in a moment of flight in a cornice of some great temple-city of the dead.
Her eyes stared forward expressionlessly at Shepley. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and the white skin, like compacted snow, had a brilliant surface sheen, the reflected light glaring against the black base of the catafalque and the long sheath-like gown that swept around her hips to the floor. Her face, like an exquisite porcelain mask, was tilted upward slightly, the half-closed eyes suggesting that the woman was asleep or dreaming. No background had been provided for the image, but the bowl of luminescence invested the persona with immense power and mystery."
"I don't want to be a "narcissist" or a pathologically selfish person -- but does being interested in cryonics make me one?"
I never really understood why this topic even comes up in discussions about cryonics. If you accept that cryonics is an experimental medical procedure and an extension of procedures like deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, why would choosing to make cryonics arrangements make one a "pathologically selfish person." I mean, we do not challenge people going for heart surgery or cancer treatment of being selfish. What is the conceptual difference?
I think a lot of these concerns reflect a simplistic zero-sum look at the world in which the preservation of the life of one person goes at the expense of other persons.
A lot of philosophical exchanges about cryonics assume that cryonics constitutes something radically different from conventional medical care and requires that we address all kinds of philosophical issues about the nature of identity and life. But our clinical definition of death are evolving all the time and cryonics does not require one to accept a concept of identity that is radically different from the one that is already implied in procedures such as general anesthesia or deep hypothermic circulatory arrest.
See Crippen DW, Whetstine LM.- Ethics review: dark angels--the problem of death in intensive care:
http://ccforum.com/content/11/1/202
Cryonics is often tied to other ideas such as transhumanism and immortalism and this explains why discussions about it can often move into obscurantist areas, but this is not necessary if one just views cryonics as an experimental treatment to preserve life.
As the cryobiologist Brian Wowk has said:
“Ethically, what is the correct thing to do when medicine encounters a difficult problem? Stablize the patient until a solution can be found? Or throw people away like garbage? Centuries from now, historians may marvel at the shortsightedness and rationalizations used to sanction the unnecessary death of millions.”
Another paper you may want to consult on the vitrification of hippocampal brain tissue is:
Pichugin Y, Fahy GM, Morin R. - Cryopreservation of rat hippocampal slices by vitrification:
http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf
> > [Anne wrote:] "I don't want to be a
> > 'narcissist' or a pathologically selfish
> > person -- but does being interested in
> > cryonics make me one?"
>
> I never really understood why this topic
> even comes up in discussions about
> cryonics.
Anne Corwin is hardly likely to be a narcissist (with or without scare quotes) -- the mere fact of worrying whether you are one sort of disqualifies you from the diagnosis. ;->
However, the topic of **clinical** narcissism (a.k.a Narcissistic Personality Disorder -- see
http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/index.html )
certainly does come up in discussions about cryonics -- even among cryonicists themselves!
Many years ago, a couple of well-known members of the cryonics community observed the prevalence of NPD-like personality characteristics in cryonics (and by extension, transhumanist) circles. "Mike Darwin" (ne Michael Federowicz), erstwhile Alcor executive and founder of the spin-off company CryCare, posted the following message (titled "comic-book grandiosity") to a cryonics mailing list in 1997:
http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=7510
jef wrote:
With many of my friends invested in cryonic preservation, I've observed that this belief is correlated with a transparent assumption of nearly infinite value of a self extended nearly infinitely.
Yeah. That's sort of the default I come from myself, via a combination of science-fiction influences and a sense (which I've had since childhood) that individuals are irreplaceable and the loss of one, however inevitable, is still tragic.
But to clarify it's never been all or even primarily about "me". (Heck, it took me until I was an adult to get to the point where I didn't feel *guilty* for existing a lot of the time, and I still have those days when I do, though I've mostly learned to tell myself to cut it out.) I just don't think people, any people, at any point "deserve" or are "obligated" to not exist. The fact that people don't exist indefinitely isn't lost on me, but that fact has no bearing on value IMO.
But on a basis more coherent over a broader context, when one sees that there is no essential self to be preserved, and that it's increasingly meaningless to attempt to assess expected utility within an open and evolving context of increasing uncertainty...
OK, you've lost me here. I'll skip to the "concrete terms" part. :P
In more concrete terms: Sure, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of cryonics, and it'll become a better bet with time. But let go of childlike/narcissistic assumptions of nearly infinite payback on behalf of a nearly infinitesimal speck of the universe, and one might see that it's like playing the lottery -- a dollar, or a hundred thousand dollars, applied in the here and now toward *creating* the future one would like to see is a much more rational bet.
Wow. I guess I've never really conceived of cryonics being anything other than a kind of high-odds lottery. I mean, it can't really be anything else so long as there's no way to actually revive the bodies, can it?
Hmm. I actually wonder, now that I think of it, if it is this "gamble" aspect that tends to result in people looking askance at cryonicists. If cryonics were known to actually work, it wouldn't be "fringe" anymore, and hence people who chose it wouldn't look any different from people pursuing any other high-tech medical treatment.
But right now it sort of sits somewhere between "really interesting burial" and "science fair experiment" and maybe a lot of people figure you wouldn't go for something that uncertain unless you had some sort of serious character flaw?
Oh, and also, I definitely think it's good for people to look at what they can do in the "here and now", and that's sort of my natural orientation to begin with (probably would get termed a "near bias" by some). I experimented for a while with a "far bias" but got totally lost trying to exist in that headspace, and in general I find I get a lot more actually done if I work forward from the present rather than trying to work backward from the future!
jimf wrote:
Of course, the wish to avoid the unpleasantness surrounding death (on whichever side of it) can be written off as mere cowardice; but the belief that one's own personality is important enough to take extreme measures to preserve from nonexistence strikes me as -- unseemly, somehow. Maybe I feel that way for the same reason I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand, and maybe that feeling marks me out as somebody who doesn't **deserve** such perpetuation (that has a satisfyingly Darwinian ring to it!).
Acknowledging upfront that cryonics presently doesn't actually work, if I can be permitted a bit of thought-experiment here, if it did work, I guess I have trouble seeing how it would be any more "unseemly" to utilize than, say, an Intensive Care Unit or some other system of complex life support.
I understand full well the warnings against considering onesself to be "more important than other people", but I don't think that frame of mind is a prerequisite for thinking it's okay to use "extreme measures" to keep someone around if such measures exist. I don't think people ought to feel "obligated" to do a ruthless cost-benefit analysis regarding their own existence followed by mandated refusal of "extreme" lifesaving measures if they don't make the utility cut.
But, as I noted in my response to Jef, it could be that it's the "gamble" aspect of cryonics itself that tends to promote that sense of "unseemliness" you mention. The "if it worked..." is a pretty big "if", and perhaps it's the size of the "if" rather than the actual goal of the experiment that raises hackles.
Aschwin wrote: I never really understood why this topic [narcissism, other "character flaws"] even comes up in discussions about cryonics.
I've never understood this either, but since it does so much, I find myself unable to ignore it and am hence trying to think it through here. For some reason I'm just....really terrified of the idea of getting innocently excited about something that sounds cool, only to find out later that I've actually been feeding into something destructive. And since I'm not totally confident in my ability to figure that kind of thing out, I figured it would be worth bringing up the subject of "what cryonics-interest could actually mean about a person's character" for discussion.
If you accept that cryonics is an experimental medical procedure and an extension of procedures like deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, why would choosing to make cryonics arrangements make one a "pathologically selfish person." I mean, we do not challenge people going for heart surgery or cancer treatment of being selfish. What is the conceptual difference?
I don't see any conceptual difference. This reasoning looks airtight to me. The only thing that I think might be figuring in here is what I mentioned in my other comments, which is the level of uncertainty currently involved in cryonics.
I think a lot of these concerns reflect a simplistic zero-sum look at the world in which the preservation of the life of one person goes at the expense of other persons.
I agree and I see that zero-sum look being destructive in all kinds of ways, such as in the way persons with severe disabilities are often written off, and the way people who are the most vulnerable tend to be the ones most commonly classed as "burdens". I don't think that's right at all.
Cryonics is often tied to other ideas such as transhumanism and immortalism
Yeah. I've been reading up over some of the history of cryonics enthusiasm and...there's a lot of kooky subcultural stuff that I think has been to the detriment of its advance as an experimental science. Just the very description of cryonics as a "movement" seems skewed to me; I mean we don't have a "chemotherapy movement" or an "antibiotic movement", after all!
This is part of the reason I strongly suspect right now that existing cryonics companies, which were started (as near as I can tell) by "enthusiasts" coming from outside the larger medical infrastructure will probably not contribute more than marginally to the actual development of medical techniques employing metabolic arrest. Rather, things will likely advance from the other direction, with patients being sustainable for longer and longer periods in a suspended state.
But I'm definitely still for the time being in the camp of those who figure cryonics, even in its presently flawed state, probably gives a person a slightly better shot at getting to see how things turn out than, say, cremation.
Anne: "...that individuals are irreplaceable and the loss of one, however inevitable, is still tragic."
Yes, but a category error pervades this discussion. It's particularly endemic to western culture, and ironically prominent among those who claim the most "objective" rationalism.
The transparent assumption of a privileged, impenetrable and inviolable "singularity of self" leads to skewed decision-making (and no end of tail-chasing about qualia, philosophical zombies, personal identity, and the like.)
It is possible -- although presently rarely seen -- to fully acknowledge the inherent and utter subjectivity of experience, all the joy and tragedy it entails, while approaching decision-making on the more coherent basis of promoting present (but evolving) values over increasing scope of consequences.
In this view nothing is lost (except the incoherent singularity of self), and the interests of self are represented (as completely as ever, which is to say, not so very well at this stage of our development) in terms of complex, fine-grained, hierarchical values expressing self's nature.
The advantages of this view have to do with its coherence, and include the following:
* Increased robustness with extension into an increasingly uncertain future.
* Monotonic assessment (within a high-dimensional space of values) of the direction of perceived increasing "good."
* With agency no longer seen as confined to the (fictional) essential self, the way is paved for intentional agency over increasing context, corresponding to increasing agreement on increasing "right."
("Increasing context" refers to the ineluctable tendency toward always-increasing information from the point of view of the agent, e.g. one acts and gains information about the consequences of one's actions, one interacts and gains a part of another agent's context, one is drawn into increasingly synergistic relationships and gains the context of the group.)
I realize that within this limited space and bandwidth I've probably lost anyone who doesn't already get what I'm saying.
So suffice it to say, roughly and simply. that if the transparent assumption of a singularity of self is removed, then decision-making more coherently accounts for a weighted mix of fine-grained hierarchical values, discounted for an uncertain future.
And in this light, given the time value of money that might be spent on cryonic preservation -- whether one dollar or a hundred thousand dollars -- one can more clearly evaluate whether those limited resources might be better spent promoting a different mix of values, e.g. children's education, care of spouse, improved science education and public policy, research for humane artificial intelligence, research and development against disease and aging in the here and now, and -- even ongoing research on cryonics -- in rational proportion.
- Jef
Strictly speaking, cryonics cannot be proven to work because that would be proof of suspended animation. The rationale for cryonics is that contemporary preservation technologies may permit resuscitation of the person in the future. Even if suspended animation would become available as a routine procedure, cryonics will not just cease to exist because there may always be diseases and forms of injury that cannot be treated with contemporary technologies.
I never like the idea of presenting cryonics as a "gamble" myself because I am not sure it is the right analogy. For starters, what does one lose when cryonics does not work? At most the monthly insurance premiums that one paid while alive. But even that is not clear because by supporting cryonics one supports its more mainstream applications in science and medicine as well (see below). And perhaps some cryonics patients other than yourself will be resuscitated and you can be said to have made a small contribution to this by keeping the organization alive.
Another problem about it is that it leads people to engage in probability estimates that not necessarily throw more light on the topic. A lot of the conditions that are required for successful resuscitation of cryonics patients are not independent of each other so one may end up with a lower estimate than is warranted. Of course there is also the problem about the rationale for assigning specific numbers to these estimates. In my opinion, these probability estimates tell you more about the person doing the calculations than the probability of cryonics patients being resuscitated in the future.
One other important objection to these probability estimates was made by the mathematician and cryonics activist Thomas Donaldson. Whether cryonics "works" or not is not independent of what we *do* about it.
What does it mean when we try to estimate the probability of cryonics "working." Perhaps the person who was found after 1 day of warm ischemia and cryopreserved without protection against ice formation will not be resuscitated, and perhaps the person who received prompt stabilization and cryopreservation with the least toxic vitrification agent to date will be resuscitated.
What is not known to many people is that without cryonics the progress in vitrification for conventional organ preservation would not be where it is today. The development of the least toxic vitrification agent for the cryopreservation of complex organs is almost solely the result of funding by cryonics supporters. As a matter of fact, this agent is currently used by Alcor for cryonics patients.
I have given quite a lot of thought to the question why cryonics is not more popular and I do not think that its technical feasibility is high on the list. If this would have been the case, more people would have made cryonics arrangements as the technologies evolved. We have not really seen this.
In my personal experience non-technical issues seem to be more important such as the issue of closure after conventional death. In cryonics there is no such certainty and that does not make it very attractive to many people because it raises all kinds of complicated personal issues. I wrote about this here:
http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2008/05/29/why-is-cryonics-so-unpopular/
As Thomas Donaldson said: "There is an IRREDUCIBLE UNCERTAINTY which is basic to cryonics, not merely an adventitious consequence of our ignorance about how memory is stored."
I think it is fair to say that many people prefer the certainty of death over the uncertainty of cryonics. Advocates of cryonics have dismissed arguments relating to uncertainty and the desire for closure too easily while being excessively modest about its technical feasibility.
Anne wrote:
> I strongly suspect right now that existing
> cryonics companies, which were started (as
> near as I can tell) by "enthusiasts" coming
> from outside the larger medical
> infrastructure will probably not contribute
> more than marginally to the actual
> development of medical techniques
> employing metabolic arrest.
There's another, darker, aspect to this: namely, that without any real guidelines for "quality of service" and without any guarantee at all about outcomes (indeed, with an implied "guarantee" that the best the can be said is that cryonics "probably gives [the customer] a slightly better shot at getting to see how things turn out than, say, cremation,"), the opportunities for fraud among the companies providing this "service" are rife.
Again, _The Loved One_ comes to mind, when the Blessed Reverend Glenworthy decides that the real estate tied up in Whispering Glades can be put to more lucrative use in a different enterprise, at which point his overriding priority becomes "Get these stiffs off my property!"
I don't think the concept isn't based in reality - I'm going to sign up soon myself. In fact I was wondering if there was a way to sign up with two of the cryonics companies to provide backup cryopreservation in case the one I am stored in goes "out of business" for some reason.
I have a genetic illness (maybe several) that have prevented me from living a full life, and would like some more time to explore life and living, as I recently passed the half century mark, and cryopreservation is the most likely way I see to accomplish that.
"Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable."
-Terence McKenna
Anne: "..I'm worried about making sure I don't end up believing anything stupid just because it sounds really cool."
I think that wise, intelligent people have the capacity to be stupid. And all of those attributes are subjective. For instance, conventional wisdom only extends so far, then becomes stupid. But only as far as we can perceive.
I like the quote, "It takes all kinds." I think people should pursue their dreams (given that they are civil, relatively sane ones). Cryonics is more sound than many social norms. People are born into "crackpottishness." Feeling guilty about trying to achieve clarity in vision to become less crackpottish is kind of funny to me, though I think it's absolutely normal (enough).
I think the re-animation tube in 'The 5th Element' isn't as far away as cryonics (and is very cool), but I accept that I could be wrong. Either way, I see no reason that that either should be seen in any way other than a continuation of medical advances.
But of all the crackpot ideas/perceptions that bother me the most, is the vague unspoken consensus that tending to the health of, and the exploration of the oceans is less important, or mystifying than space.
> Advocates of cryonics have dismissed arguments
> relating to uncertainty and the desire for
> closure too easily while being excessively
> modest about its technical feasibility.
Well, except that some cryonicists got a big second wind in the "technical feasibility" department when they joined forces in the 90s with the techno-utopian enthusiasts for "molecular nanotechnology" (MNT). Suddenly, the coming of nanotech seemed, to these folks, to provide the technical "underpinnings" for hitherto-inconceivable techniques of repair and reanimation of cryonically-preserved bodies (or brains), at least if you believed K. Eric Drexler et al. Combine that with the upcoming technological Singularity and it no longer mattered that nobody had a clear idea of how MNT was going to work -- it would all be swept up in the exponential growth of technology, including Artificial Intelligences with godlike powers. At least, if you believed Kurzweil et al. So Live Long Enough to Live Forever, or, barring that, make sure you're signed up with a cryonics company. Don't miss the Big S!
Oh, goody. You'll never guess what I ran into today at Barnes & Noble -- a new Tor SF hardback called _The Unincorporated Man_, a first novel by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin.
http://www.amazon.com/Unincorporated-Man-Dani-Kollin/dp/0765318997
It's about a billionaire from the near future who goes into cryonic suspension and gets reanimated in 300 years.
It's got everything to set Extropian hearts a-flutter -- libertarian economics, molecular nanotech, gray goo, and chapter epigraphs by K. Eric Drexler and Milton Friedman.
Not sure if I'm actually going to be able to read it, but if I could force myself through John C. Wright's Golden Age books. . .
Much to think about!
I mean we don't have a "chemotherapy movement" or an "antibiotic movement", after all!
But we do have the March of Dimes (polio, birth defects), American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Alzheimers Association, and a multitude of other societies devoted to the prevention and cure of individual diseases.
Is it so strange to have non-profits devoted to the cure of extreme frostbite?
Cryonicists aren't the first amateurs to practice new medical technology in advance of mainstream medicine. Early resucitative medicine was carried out by enthusiast amateurs -- see Steve Harris's article:
The Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead.
As for the alleged selfishness of cryonics, well, it doesn't particularly bother me. After all, people spend enormous sums of money on video games, movies, houses, fancy cars, clothing, pet food, etc. Much of that money could be used to pay for orphan care. Why are cryonicists being singled out as particularly selfish, given all the other ways people choose to spend money on themselves?
Participating in cryonics is not particularly fun. You have to spend time thinking about your own death, research insurance and cryonics companies, and sign up and pay for insurance and cryonics dues.
When you're sick and old, you have to endure having strangers linger about your house, filling your living room with weird medical devices, waiting for you to die.
As I see it, cryonicists are like the participants in a clinical trial. There's a slim chance that the medicine might help them, but odds are that the principal benefit of their participation will be the information gathered. This in turn could then be used to help future victims of death.
If cryonicists are selfish, it seems to me they're no more selfish than the participants in any other clinical trial.
crasch: Is it so strange to have non-profits devoted to the cure of extreme frostbite?
No, I wouldn't say so. And judging from some of the responses to this post, and some of the further reading I've done over the past week or so, I think that the current community of cryonics-interested persons (or at least a segment of it) is a vast improvement over the 1970s/Timothy Leary-era stuff.
I think that cryonics did shoot itself in the foot (so to speak) a generation or so back by going on about "immortality" and associating itself too strongly with marginal subcultures, but I'm seeing some indication that maybe the subject has more sense and less hype associated with it than it used to.
jimf said: Oh, goody. You'll never guess what I ran into today at Barnes & Noble -- a new Tor SF hardback called _The Unincorporated Man_, a first novel by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin.
Oh geez. I haven't read that one, and I'm not sure I want to. Though I don't know if it could be as bad as The First Immortal -- that one was just ridiculous, to the point where I don't even know if I finished it. The characters just seemed creepy and irritated me to no end. The speculative-sciencey stuff was all right, but the writing style and the characterization was so awful it almost seemed like a parody.
For "fun" cryonics reading I would much more readily recommend I Was A Teenage Popsicle. Not only does it get into the basics of vitrification, it has hoverskates! And unitards! Silly as heck, but fun.
Interesting post, Anne.
Personally, I'm a big fan of marginal subcultures, and I hope transhumanism remains a "marginal subculture" for as long as the mainstream deems it to be. Lots of great ideas come from the fringe, and it seems like transhumanism is a fringe with particularly good ideas.
Michael A.: I've spent my life in one margin or another, but I don't think much actual benefit comes from the margins where you have people like Kurzweil talking about reconstituting their dead father from DNA fragments and memories.
Not saying that typifies all of transhumanists (and I know you specifically have voiced your disagreement with Kurzweil on the matter described above), but still -- I hope you can read my post(s) nowadays and not see them as "pessimism" but as the thoughts of a person sincerely trying to figure out what is actually going on in reality.
I was under the impression that if you actually froze the body, the water in you would expand and destroy every cell from the inside. I'm at a loss to imagine any way to halt every needed biological process that wouldn't result in death by definition.
The concept seems like a "magic bullet" to throw dreams upon (like that novel I'm going to write ... no, really, I'm totally going to do it). But I don't think that being aware of one's self and interested in continuing existence is a sign of nacissism, because narcissism is an extreme idea of self-love. You need more credentials to get that title.
The idea of getting to go to sleep and waking up in a world beyond your imagination is fricking awesome. Parcicularly since you then have the pleasure of imagining a really cool future - probly including robots and hopefully including solutions to all of life's problems, for instance, death.
Healthy realism is probly the cure for managing all our silly dreams. Sorta like how healthy dreaming is probly the cure for surviving our reality. It is unlikely we could exist as we do without the two co-inciding, so I figure we can choose to strike a balance somewhere. I'd like to be a wizard, but then if there were really wizards out there... think of all the jerk wizards we'd have running amuck? I'm sure I'd have amucked at least three times in high school.
I'd say you're allowed to fancy a dip in a freeze-bath tho, yay Freedom. I just view it as a partial dodge from the burden of knowing we're all toast eventually, on par with belief in an afterlife full of puffy clouds. It's the sort of understanding we're all capable of coming to, but it's not quite as pleasing as what we can imagine.
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