Blueberry comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alicorn 09 July 2010 06:54AM

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Comment author: Blueberry 14 July 2010 04:26:44PM 8 points [-]

That is really a beautiful comment.

It's a good point, and one I never would have thought of on my own: people find it painful to think they might have a chance to survive after they've struggled to give up hope.

One way to fight this is to reframe cryonics as similar to CPR: you'll still die eventually, but this is just a way of living a little longer. But people seem to find it emotionally different, perhaps because of the time delay, or the uncertainty.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 July 2010 08:46:27PM 5 points [-]

I always figured that was a rather large sector of people's negative reaction to cryonics; I'm amazed to find someone self-aware enough to notice and work through it.

Comment author: ata 14 July 2010 09:44:20PM 1 point [-]

One way to fight this is to reframe cryonics as similar to CPR: you'll still die eventually, but this is just a way of living a little longer. But people seem to find it emotionally different, perhaps because of the time delay, or the uncertainty.

That's more comparable to being in a long coma with some uncertain possibility of waking up from it, so perhaps it could be reframed along those lines; some people probably do specify that they should be taken off of life support if they are found comatose, but to choose to be kept alive is not socially disapproved of, as far as I know.