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ata comments on Is cryonics evil because it's cold? - Less Wrong
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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.
Indeed. Cold storage evokes science fiction and the various cartoonish parodies of it, and popular media depictions of wicked or comical immortalists, and religious mythology to some extent (being dead long enough to become "cold" and then coming back to life), while being unconscious but warm is more evocative of things that are seen as neither weird nor threatening nor comical, like Sleeping Beauty, and, more generally, of benign things like sleep, and undesirable-but-clearly-better-than-being-dead things like being in a coma.
So maybe it's actually more the "COLD is DEAD" metaphor at work than any of the "COLD is [something immoral or threatening]" metaphors. The idea of a person being that cold and still being revived seems much more like a resurrection than like waking up or even coming out of a long coma — which probably contributes to a "blasphemous!" pattern match among those whose religions tell them that dying and coming back to life is only for really important people, and a "hogwash!" pattern match among people who have rejected those religions.