= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Is cryonics evil because it's cold? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (24)
It's interesting, because I don't feel negatively about cryonics (and back when I did I don't think it had to do with coldness), but when you suggested the normal-temperature equivalent I got a very different mental image.
That person, the one at room temperature who can be brought back later, is sleeping.
Meanwhile, cryo-related mental images are all science-fictiony. I'm thinking of Fry from Futurama and the Ancient lady in Stargate SG-1 and so on. I have examples of those readily available to my pattern-matching software (I imagine most people in the general population aren't as familiar with this sort of media) and I can think of the previously frozen persons walking around lucid and alive.
But they weren't sleeping. And sleep is so harmless, so inviting.
Edit: "Room temperature" should really have been "body temperature". But the distinction seems relatively small in my mind. I think the key is that you can touch somebody who's body temperature or room temperature, if you want. You can go pat them on the head or hold their hand. You can't do that with someone frozen.
Meanwhile my instincts are making me literally cringe just reading that... The same way I cringe when see or hear tell of foreign locations where meat is sold unrefrigerated on the street. Lukewarm meat feels wrong at a visceral level.
Agreed, though my post did say "normal body temperature", not room temperature. A human body at normal body temperature just seems like a person who's at least slightly alive or was very recently alive, not like a dead and rotting piece of meat.
I understand. I was going with Alicorn's description - and normal body temperature incidentally 'feels' a whole lot worse to me.
We're just talking about instinctive subjective reactions here but I note that one of the appealing things to me about your specific proposed explanation was that it didn't talk about temperature or bodies at all:
That sounds good to me. And to Alicorn it translated into imagery of room temperature and sleeping. The same translation that feels 'inviting' to Alicorn feels revolting to me. Perhaps your (Ata's) instincts are also somewhat different to mine in as much as 'normal body temperature' feels better than 'room temperature'.