[justinalanbass]

Being an avid cryonicist, I have attempted to express these myths to a wide variety of people. The very few and open-minded folks that will move past utter dismissal usually have a deep and visceral illogical fear of death - or a deep and visceral religious belief in the afterlife. These "Cryonics Myths Debunked" tend to only further convince those who are likely to choose Cryonics anyways.

There must be a better way to convince the masses, but so far no billionaire or government has stepped forward with a serious effort here, and I doubt such a thing will occur in our lifetimes.

My point is, other avid cryonicists should study serious and effective approaches, and abandon the "rational" one. But hey, making it up high on the hacker-news top-10 is a good start.

[philwelch]

Funny, I find that the cryonics advocates are the ones with the deep and visceral illogical fear of death. That’s why one signs up for cryonics, right? Being at peace with one’s mortality removes the selfish “rational” incentive for cryonics.

Individual people are replaceable, and don’t belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century. Because that’s the kind of mess you propose to inflict on our future descendants.

[OscarCunningham]

One might as well say that being at peace with one's hunger removes the selfish "rational" incentive for food.

[philwelch]

Yup, hoping to have one's frozen corpse reanimated in a few centuries is completely the same thing as eating food. You got me there.

[justinalanbass]

I can't speak for everyone, but my interest in Cryonics stems from a love of life, not a fear of death. Preservation will not solve grief, death, or displacement in time. Nor does it necessitate immortality - I want to die, eventually, but if there is a chance at more life, I'll take it. People have spent more on experimental cancer treatments with similar uncertainty and discomfort, so I suppose it's similar to that.

I would gladly revive a non famous person from the 18th century - diversity in thought doesn't seem to be a mess to me. And any future that would revive me would necessarily agree - I'm just betting there are enough people like me when resurrection is possible. And if everyone is like you, I'd gladly opt to be dissected and studied instead.

[philwelch]

Do you really love life, in and of itself, or do you love the things that life makes possible? Just because you're alive doesn't mean you're playing with your great-grandchildren or relaxing on a beach in the Caribbean or making passionate love or creating something that makes people happy. Mere life, without these things, is less than worthless. The industrialized world we live in gives us so much "life" that most of us end up slowly tortured to death in hospitals, delirious and vacant and in interminable, incomprehensible pain, because we consider that more merciful than simply letting sick people die.

And if that's not enough for you, maybe future generations will have the opportunity to reanimate your corpse in a 25th century hospital and torture it some more to see what they can recover from the brain cells that survived the ordeal? Feel free and sign up for that if you want, but I'm out.

[justinalanbass]

Every day we live for those things and face a small chance that some powerful government or entity will capture and torture us or our loved ones indefinitely, for scientific reasons, or perhaps for no reason at all. Escaping life is one solution, but bracing against fear and leaning onto hope seem like more appealing choices to me. Pessimism is a valid argument against Cryonics, but since it's as unfalsifiable as optimism, I'll gladly take the choice that makes me happier. Maybe that is a priveleged and rare choice these days, but all I can say is I hope you find optimism and hope someday in this life, regardless of the viability of some inconsequential technology.

[romwell]

Maybe I don't want to live in a world inhabited by "reanimated massed".

But I do want to see spaceships bringing people beyond the boundaries of human life spans.

I don't one can reasonably hope for faster-than-light travel. But cryonics is a technology that looks, at the very least, feasible.

[Momquist]

> If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century.

Sounds like Riverworld. I think it could be quite interesting. But anyway, whether it's a potential mess or not is something for our future descendants to decide on.

Advocating cryonics today doesn't imply that our descendants, even if they have the technology, will accept the resurrection of masses. We have immigration laws today, I'm sure the same concept could be thought up for "people outside their own time", if it ever is an issue.

[philwelch]

Or I could just accept my mortality and let my corpse go to some productive use, like organ donation or teaching medical students, rather than investing in some narcissistic notion of being resurrected.

[Wh1zz]

As romantic as "coming to peace with mortality" might sound, I enjoy living life too much to idly accept that i will at some point feel the breeze in my hair for the last time, or never again smell a flower's perfume, or gaze on a beautiful view. Sure, if everything fails, i will have to accept it. But why not give my everything in the mission of taking life further, even if i can help it by an atomic amount? What if there were as many great minds working on solving aging as there are working on cancer research? Why not try and bring a contribution? What if everyone else capable would have the same realisation? Why sit idly and wait to be carried by waves to nothing at all?

[philwelch]

That's the most poetic defense of base selfishness I've read since Ayn Rand.

[justinalanbass]

You could do both: organ donation is compatible with brain preservation.

Perhaps some are motivated by narcissism, but I'd like to think my fellow cryonicists are motivated by hope, and a belief that the future will be a warm and welcoming place. If the future is narcissistic, I wouldn't want to be revived anyways.

[reasonattlm]

You also were born in the past. Are you not comfortable with death by your own declaration? So why do you work to avoid it, rather than embracing it? Why are you still alive? Are you not, by your own ethics, outside your time, creating a mess, and less valuable than people born after you?

Yet you undertake continual efforts to remain alive, embracing the use of food and medicine - technologies developed purely and entirely to stave off naturally occurring death.

I feel that you haven't fully examined your own position on this matter.

[philwelch]

> I feel that you haven't fully examined your own position on this matter.

You're the one who hasn't fully examined my position on this matter, judging by your bizarre strawman argument.

[justinalanbass]

I'm curious what other arguments you have, personally. I'm not sure you've expressed it fully yet.

[Wh1zz]

I think he made some good points. What is the strawman here, if you care to expand?

[philwelch]

Just because I don't think it's desirable for me to be alive 300 years from now doesn't mean I don't think it's desirable for me to be alive right now.

[nordsieck]

In principle I could be on board with cryonics, but I have one principled objection that I can't seem to get around:

I see no reason why anyone with the ability to re-animate/heal cryo-preserved strangers would do so.

[joe_the_user]

If we had the ability to reanimate 1,000 people from ancient Egypt, it seems highly plausible the resources could be found to do it. These people would be a font of information from a long forgotten past. The only question is whether they could adjust to the present.

So if preserved people from the past survived long enough, it seems like historical interest could motivate people to re-animate them. There may be other motivations but that's one.

Maybe only a small selection would be reanimated at any one time. But that might others to revived later.

[Koshkin]

Well, one objection could be that much of the information about the ancient civilizations has been lost, whereas it is highly improbable that a person could add anything to the knowledge about the modern world to a future historian or a linguist.

[joe_the_user]

Maybe but it's pretty common for much knowledge of even the recent past to be lost and it seems plausible that even a detailed selection of texts couldn't give the experience that someone who was there could give.

[OscarCunningham]

Presumably they can be paid to do so from the same fund whose interest is being used to keep the bodies frozen.

[justinalanbass]

Diversity of thought, novelty. In the same way it never gets old to watch a child experience "I am your father!" for the first time, I'm sure humans of the future will enjoy entertaining humans of the past.