Comment on Delayed Solutions Game

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:33:58 GMT

Yes. Cultural memes around death seem to make cryonics seem unrealistic or even downright rebellious against cultural norms. Frequently I hear people say "If someone wants to freeze their corpse as their last wishes I support that right." But they are already calling the patient a corpse and referring to the vitrification process as freezing. So it's kind of a back-handed endorsement as far as cryonics rights go.

Maybe part of the problem is that alternate labels to "corpse" and "freezing" are too complex or seem to imply agreement with cryonics, which the speaker does not want to prematurely grant. I don't actually consider freezing to be too offensive as a colloquial term, it's just technically inaccurate (when and where good cryoprotectant perfusion can be obtained) and contributes to ignorant dismissals. And "corpse" is accurate if the hypothesis that cryonics is a failure is correct -- the trouble is that by accepting it you are (at least implicitly) implicitly embedding the hypothesis in your terminology, and hence mixing up map and territory.

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