I have not seen a reason to think cryonics will work at all.
Even if we actually do find a way to restore frozen near-death people to life, you'd better write a heck of a pitch as to why future humans should spend resources on reviving and healing you.
Never mind all the resources being spent on keeping you properly frozen all that time.
That's all assuming the company running your freezer doesn't just go belly-up after ninety years, leaving you to thaw and rot after all that expense was dumped into keeping your now-corpse uselessly preserved for decades.
Cryonics actually plays the role so many atheists believe religion plays for the religious - comfort in the face of The End that is inevitably coming to you.
It is false hope, a tool to help you deceive yourself into thinking you can defeat death.
Why would they not want to revive you? How awesome would it be, if we could revive someone who lived around the year 1500, 1000 or even 0? I expect people in the year 3000 (if there are still people around and if they have it relatively good) would see it equally when looking to the year 2000.
I would be much more interested in what a tenth century peasant had to say considering all the famous ones were the only ones whose perspectives we get to see.
The historical gaps concern the other 90% of the population.
The point still applies though. After you've revived 4 or 5 peasants, you've probably gotten most of the information you were interested in. And now you have 4 or 5 peasants who are poorly adjusted to the world they now find themselves in, and you have to take care of them for a long time. How many would you revive?
I'd be worried some rich psychopath (actually, probably an AI) would resurrect people and put them into a torture dungeon for eternity.
Imagine never being able to die. Only suffer.
No mouth, must scream vibes.
Who knows what the future holds.
But in the remote chance this is what the future holds, the AI may not even need your body. It might be able to simulate you up to the moment of your death. Or find some quirk of physics and pull you forward in time. To suffer forever.
Or maybe it's benevolent and lets us live in an eternity of bliss?
Maybe it gets bored and does this for all humans that ever lived. There might be some arbitrary criteria or some random number generator it uses to decide your fate.
I find all of this much more compelling than religion's perspective of the afterlife.
Take that, Basilisk. My machination is worse (or better).
You really ought to read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The author has already thought of basically the same thing and written a rather compelling yet disturbing short story about. In 1967, no less.
But if we're going to give unfathomable power to such an AI, it's not much more of a leap to give it the ability to resurrect people from the past and subject them to whatever it desires.
Taking it even one step further and comparing it to the Simulation Hypothesis [1], perhaps we're already there. The machine might be making us live our lives again only at some point to surprise us with some unthinkable horror or delight.
If such a machine arises and is capable of these feats, then we might currently be living in re-simulations of our past lives that have already ended.
Yeah, I prefer just denying the philosophical coherency of death (only experiences exist and being dead is not an experience), or alternatively relying on a quantum multiverse or other levels of the multiverse that imply one cannot die because they'll always live on somewhere.
So true. Even in the best case scenario if they manage to revive you perpetually, the universe will eventually end and then you'll be there to experience it... For someone who is afraid of dying, I can't think of a worse way to go.
To an atheist, uncertainty is the source of all hope.
>To an atheist, uncertainty is the source of all hope.
Isn't that somewhat backward? To an atheist, the certainty that they won't be going to an afterlife seems to be a source of hope, and for the religious person, the idea that they might is the same.
I don't know about other atheists, but I get some comfort knowing that the universe will continue to exist long after I die.
I don't believe that there is a god but that doesn't rule out the possibility of some kind of afterlife or reincarnation or alternative form of consciousness. There are still a lot of possibilities on the table and these possibilities are a source of hope.
When you think that your consciousness is special, irreplaceable and irreproducible, death becomes a lot more frightening.
On the other hand, if you believe, based on empirical evidence, that your consciousness can be manufactured out of a piece of meat with some chemicals and electricity as the result of a totally random natural process (evolution), that gives a lot of hope.
Small nit but my so far amateur understanding of philosophy of mind indicates to me that there isn't empirical evidence connecting Mind to neurochemistry so clearly. Neither, of course, is there any evidence of the reverse, that a non physical Mind can magically influence the physical world through the brain interface.
As an atheist, delving into the materialism vs dualism philosophical debate was fascinating. I was always a stout materialist but learning it hadn't managed to fend off every philosophical thrust was difficult but enlightening.
There is solid empirical evidence that every human was created out of basic physical materials (e.g. DNA, proteins). If this is the case, and you believe that every human is conscious then clearly the 'soul' must be derived from these physical materials and the processes which were applied to them.
Not afterlife. It's just another medical treatment. And not one that much different from the current system world wide. If you have money/power you get better access to healthcare.
Sure, basically-everywhere-but-the-US has socialized medicine, but still everywhere if Jeff Bezos got sick he could go "I'll buy this hospital end every doctor in it. Do your best to cure me".
Freezing isn't magic. Just think of it as a better CPR. You wouldn't say this woman got "afterlife", even though apparently her blood wasn't pumping for 40 minutes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm
There's an expression called ruling from the grave to reflect the difficulty of enforcing a contract after you are dead. The same principle applies as those frozen people are dead in every legal sense and practical sense and likely any biological sense.
I would be extremely motivated to revive them and promote reviving them because I would also want to be frozen and revived. I assume this would be even moreso the case if society develops reviving technology, and therefore knows it actually works.
the argument is this: certain death vs a miniscule one in a quadrillion chance or lower. It will always tilt the other way no matter what the current scientific status quo is saying because it's possible in theory and it has happened to living organisms before just not humans. Whether it's good for environment, your siblings pocket etc is not part of the core argument.
I think even if you ignore the environment, and cost, the argument for cryonics is not very good.
Let's say someone is successfully revived, there's still heart attacks, cancer, crime (and not just "lowly" criminals, crime also happens within families for inheritance, for example), accidents (car, or just slipping in the shower), earthquakes, ... The list is pretty much endless.
Death is unavoidable, IMHO it's best to learn to cope with it, and focus efforts on reducing what most people would consider the worst deaths (infants, long and painful diseases, wars and torture, etc).
That said, as long as not many people try this (the environmental cost would be high), if many people think about this possibility and that helps them cope with their mortality, and that of their loved ones, good for them.
Even though Death is unavoidable, it’s still a good idea to wear a seatbelt.
Edited to add: it’s hard to imagine a civilisation with the technology to successfully re-animate a corpse, but that is unable to treat heart disease & cancer. Not impossible I suppose, but seems highly implausible.
Learning to cope with death is not actually mutually exclusive with taking a punt on cryonics! A 1% chance of survival is still a 99% chance of death, so you'd better have made your peace with it either way.
Yes, if only for the legal status of property/inheritance: if you are to be revided, who owns your wealth? Do you children inherit? And/when you are revived, what resources do you have? Is your family/descendants in charge of you, or you of them?
Cryogenic preservation is treated like mummification, you’re just declared dead. At which point your assets are likely to just get spent.
If you want to be safe, set up a trust that pays to you preferably and if not then to any descendants you have. That’s unlikely to work if you’re somehow revived in several hundred years, but it’s better than hopping random people will hand you money voluntarily.
Or give the money to your children so they have a small head start that can use to conquer the world (eventually).
Also, what happens if you are revived?
Where are you going to live? Your home was probably sold a long time ago, or you must share it with all the intermediate revived generations. What about money?
Where are you going to work? Imagine the frozen time was only 100 year. It is difficult to predict what will happen in 100 years, but it is easier to look at the past. Medical doctors didn't have penicillin and Electrical Engineers didn't have transistors. You must take most of your university courses again and perhaps part of your high school classes too.
Africa is a big continent, there is a wide difference in income and education level, from country to country and even inside each country.
If you have some spare money to pay a refrigerator for 100 years, you are probably spoiled and want nice living conditions afterwards.
Anyway, imagine you live outside a city and have only a small plot of land for subsistence. After the 100 years you don't have even the small plot of land and don't have the small herd that you inherit from your parents. How/where are you going to live? Farming has changed in the last 100 years. Artificial nitrogen fertilizers have slightly more than 100 years, now there are genetically modified crops, the preferred crops have changed. (Do you know how to harvest soy?) The cattle management has also changed, antibiotics, vitamins supplements, the number of free range herds is decreasing,...
It's not a generic tangent - it's a direct reference to Pascal's wager [1]. Unfortunately the parent doesn't make their argument any more generic that Pascal's wager itself.
Ah I see. But then you should have said "Sounds just like Pascal's Wager". That's a great point and not generic at all.
The trouble with what you did post is that it landed with readers as generic religious flamewar whether you meant it that way or not. I realize it's not always possible to predict how things will land, but the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent. Here are some previous explanations on this theme if interested:
God wants your exclusive devotion. The freezer doesn't care what else you're doing to help you to cheat death, so you can spread your faith around more and hedge your bets.
Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation. "Not giving your family an additional $80,000 on your death" amounts to the same thing as "taking $X from them in perpetuity", but it's psychologically different. It's all about the cost-benefit analysis, whose outcome may be different for different people; some people just don't value their lives very much and are more willing to die the true death, some people have family who are getting on just fine without the cash injection provided by their death so are more willing to spend the money on preservation, and so on.
"Not giving your family closure" is something you just have to discuss with your own family. I, for one, would treat cryopreservation as effectively death with a rather unusual body-disposal mechanism, for the purposes of grieving etc; there's certainly almost no chance I'll see a cryopreserved person again before my own first death. For a family made up of people like me, that particular argument holds no water at all.
"Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation."
Which just adds another gamble. What are the chances of the economy having enough consistent growth that those investments last longer than it takes to revive you?
That depends on how cynical you are. There's also a non-zero probability that you're woken up in some sort of dystopia, made immortal and tortured until the heat death of the universe. Basically "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Death isn't the worst outcome imaginable.
Surely mass cryogenics is a non-starter in this day and age when we are concerned with lowering carbon emissions. All that refrigeration in perpetuity would consume so much energy, and keeping the dead frozen would erase the gains that we expect to get from the gradual decline in birthrates.
Are the carbon emissions that big of a deal? Every house in North America has at least one freezer. What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"?
I've sometimes fancied that the discovery of immortality might be good for the environment, it changes the incentives for the biggest abusers. With that said, I'm not entirely confident of that in practice.
Volume scales cubically while surface area with the square of the length. It should be possible to build large scalable cooled facilities.
I do agree though that we aren't ready for such a system yet, both legally (currently a frozen person counts as dead, leading to their assets being taken away) and ecologically (carrying capacity limits of our planet). One day we might, who knows.
Would you have a planned death at 75 to potentially get resurrected in 200 years? I say yes. I like how it creates death planning. Just better hope the interest keeps compounding!
We are told we are born form our parents and from our culture. What if there was another story? what if we are dreaming, asleep? Or as I said before, maybe our birth is actually a death. Logically and superficially, yes, there is a thing we call birth. But what is it if you do not name it?
What did your face look like before you were born?
What, risk waking up to be transported to a "re-education" facility because what you did (or believed) in the past is no longer acceptable/legal to the current Maoist/Rightwing/Religious/Populist nut jobs in charge. Wake up to find the planet inundated and starving. Wake up to find that every single person you loved is now dead ... seems a bit of a hard sell.
Wake up to get put to work for another 100 years so you can pay more bills and then either die or be frozen again if you can afford it.
Actually this would be a cool short story about someone who has to constantly go through this process, each time working deeper and deeper in the future only to be frozen again.
Even if we actually do find a way to restore frozen near-death people to life, you'd better write a heck of a pitch as to why future humans should spend resources on reviving and healing you.
Never mind all the resources being spent on keeping you properly frozen all that time.
That's all assuming the company running your freezer doesn't just go belly-up after ninety years, leaving you to thaw and rot after all that expense was dumped into keeping your now-corpse uselessly preserved for decades.
Cryonics actually plays the role so many atheists believe religion plays for the religious - comfort in the face of The End that is inevitably coming to you.
It is false hope, a tool to help you deceive yourself into thinking you can defeat death.