Hal Finney being cryopreserved now • Hacker News Board

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#271

Post by amalag » Sun, Aug 31, 2014, 12:44 AM UTC

maaku wrote: post #270

amalag wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they are going to resuscitate the fellow after freezing him for 50 years?

Yes. The brain undergoes fewer changes during 50 years at liquid N2 temperature than 40 minutes at room temperature. Next question?

I only have one question: What is the difference between a dead body and living body?

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#272

Post by advancedatheist » Sun, Aug 31, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

apsec112 wrote: post #163

jacquesm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a commoditization. Religion will charge what they think they buyer will be able to afford, cryopreservation companies charge what they think it should cost to get the problem pushed beyond their own lifetimes. It's a scam, but a very clever one, just like religion. The only mitigating factor to me is that the participants here go in eyes wide open rather than that they are sucked in as defenceless children.

Calling it a "scam" implies that, not only is cryonics hopeless, but that the cryonicists agree it is hopeless and are just lying to people for money. Do you have any evidence of that at all?

Some neuroscientists and cryobiologists think that cryonics deserves a second look as a way to try to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state by approaching the problem as a challenge in applied neuroscience. They have set up the Brain Preservation Foundation to raise money for incentive prizes to encourage scientists to push hard on the envelope of current and reachable brain preservation techniques:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/

http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/faq

Two prominent figures in the skeptic community, Michael Shermer and Susan Blackmore, have lent their names to the Foundation as advisers, so they apparently consider the idea scientifically defensible:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/advisors

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#273

Post by pron » Wed, Sep 03, 2014, 5:59 PM UTC

drcode wrote: post #255

pron wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Not more so than in some other religions with their own versions of an afterlife. It all depends on your faith.

I find it really annoying when people compare cryopreservation to religious belief in an afterlife. It's sort of like saying "Dieting is an eating disorder"- Yes, they share some superficial similarities (and some people may have both) but in any substantive way they are totally different things.

I think they're superficially different, and continuing the eating disorder analogy, consider this anecdote. in the middle ages, monks and nuns used to torment themselves in many ways. While men used various inventive self-corporal-punishment techniques, women mostly employed one: starvation. It was their fight against their earthly body, which they tried to minimize as possible. So was that an eating disorder? Absolutely! It's just that today, instead of reducing your earthly body to become more spiritual, women (mostly) have other excuses for the same practice, namely modern standards of beauty. When a sociologist or anthropologist encounters something like that, the assumption is that a deep underlying human psychological need uses contemporary ideas and beliefs to find justification. When it was "known" that superhuman deities rule the world, the afterlife was their domain; now, when science rules, ideas from science fiction explain those (currently?) superhuman abilities and the after-life they bring. So the same deep cause is expressed using contemporary ideas.

If you don't like the word religion, we can call it "a belief in the afterlife", although the same trend applies to other behaviors that have commonly been considered religious, so the correlation is far stronger than just a belief in the afterlife (there are also notions about "purity" that are now explained by pseudo/shoddy science).