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Cryonics Myths

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Re: Cryonics Myths

#21

Post by romwell »

philwelch wrote: post #18
justinalanbass wrote: post #2

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…

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…

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.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#22

Post by reasonattlm »

philwelch wrote: post #18
justinalanbass wrote: post #2

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…

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…

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.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#23

Post by nordsieck »

justinalanbass wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#24

Post by philwelch »

reasonattlm wrote: post #22
philwelch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 en…

> 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.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#25

Post by empath75 »

apsec112 wrote: post #15
nwatson wrote: post #7

Cryonics Myth #1: "Trustees 200 years in future at a time when your disease [X] is completely curable will care to bring you back." There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care, and even if they do the cooling system failover will not work in the particularly hot summer of 2074.

While there is a real risk that cryonics organizations will fail, there's no reason to think it's a foregone conclusion. Tons of organizations have been around for over two hundred years. The oldest non-profits in continuous existence are well over a thousand years old. There's no legal barrier to a non-profit corporation or trust continuing to exist indefinitely, as many indeed have. (Heck, the Nobel Prizes are an a…

There is no shortage of people in the world and no reason to add additional people who are old or diseased, and have no particular skills that are necessary in the future.

It’s much cheaper (not to mention more fun) to make more babies.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#26

Post by joe_the_user »

nordsieck wrote: post #23
justinalanbass wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#28

Post by placebo »

As the procedure has not been proved to be reversible, it suggests to me that finding a future cure for the original ailment is the easiest assumption to make in this field. I'm more interested to get better answers to the myth that "Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived" than those presented in the article. I'd be hard pressed to say that there are things I think are impossible, but there are a great many things I think are very improbable. In the movie A.I., there's a part where advanced aliens temporarily restore the life of the hero's "mother" using a lock of her hair and some pseudoscientific stuff about information they managed to retrieve from the space-time continuum. All this without even having access to her brain! Impossible? I don't know - perhaps having the theoretical ability to retrieve a specific configuration which maybe exists at some dimension, somehow holographically stored in the fabric of universe combined with an unimaginably advanced intelligence and technological ability might make it doable. Do I believe there's a non zero probability if it being possible? Yes. Do I believe it will ever happen? No. Although cryonics is far less presumptuous than reviving back a personality from a lock of hair and information extracted from the "spacetime continuum", the complete lack of evidence for any sort of reversibility of the process makes me extremely skeptical in the wisdom in paying for such a procedure, regardless of how well intentioned it might be.

Re: Cryonics Myths

#29

Post by reasonattlm »

placebo wrote: post #28

As the procedure has not been proved to be reversible, it suggests to me that finding a future cure for the original ailment is the easiest assumption to make in this field. I'm more interested to get better answers to the myth that " Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived " than those presented in the article. I'd be hard pressed to say that there are things I think are impossible, but there are a gre…

http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636

"Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study's goal was to test C. elegans' memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans, we establish that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal's behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast-cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing."

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