= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
skeptical_lurker comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - 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 (350)
The big cryonics story of the week, about the Thai toddler Matheryn Naovaratpong:
The Girl Who Would Live Forever
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-girl-who-would-live-forever
Two-year-old cryogenically frozen by parents
http://www.cnet.com/news/two-year-old-cryogenically-frozen-by-parents/
The girl who could come back from the dead: Toddler who died from a brain tumour is FROZEN by parents who hope she can one day be revived by medical advances
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3043272/The-girl-come-dead-Toddler-died-brain-tumour-FROZEN-parents-hope-one-day-revived-medical-advances.html#ixzz3XoNKDW00
PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:
How to live forever
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/
PZ Myers:
Here's a fun topic of conversation - if I happen across PZ Myers, and he's having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?
Yes, if they have cryonics or its successor technologies for themselves and they can reason about consequences carefully. If you have an injury or pathology in the 24th Century that the health care providers don't know how to treat, you could go into brain preservation to see if the health care providers in, say, the 26th Century would know how to help you. Some of those health care professionals active in the 26th Century might have been born in the 20th or 21st Centuries and have gone through a round or two of brain preservation themselves, and they entered the practice of medicine in the 26th Century as one of their new careers. "Hey, I know this guy. He helped to resuscitate me in 2327. I owe him so I'll return the favor."
I get that Myers' article pisses a lot of people here off (myself included), but let's try to refrain from mean-spirited-ness, neh? Mind-killing happens readily enough by itself without people helping the process along.
Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I'm going to make an exception.
The fact that his behavior emotionally triggers you is no reason to engage in bad and unproductive behavior yourself. Even if it's "justified".
I think you are greatly missing the point. If you want to be effective in the world, sometimes that involves being politically smart. And sometimes the politically smart thing to do is a show of force. You should not jump from emotion straight to action. But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.
I have nothing against calculated actions that shows force. Against a blogger who in the business of getting page views by stirring up controversy being mean-spirited isn't showing force.
He's not saying in that quote that they shouldn't feel an obligation, he's making a point focusing on doubting whether they'd want to resurrect them. I think they very likely would, and PZ is ignoring the entire first-in/last-out which cryonics plans on using to further encourage people to resurrect, but it helps to actually focus on what his criticism is.
If you can perform CPR with little cost to you, you should. If performing CPR has a large cost to you, or if there are so many people that need CPR that performing CPR on all of them is, in total, a large cost to you, you are not obliged to do anything.
How easy would it be for the future civilization to resurrect the brains?
I'm pretty sure cost of resurrection isn't his true rejection, his true rejection is more like 'point and laugh at weirdos'.
I'm guessing that any civilisation capable of resurrecting cryonics patients would be post-scarcity, and cost would therefore be irrelivent. But even if I am wrong on this point, well, to continue his mummified Egyptians analogy, can you imagine how much money you would make selling the TV rights to the first ever resurrection of a Pharaoh?
Additionally, don't Alcor, and many individuals, have funds set up to cover the cost of resurrection?
I understand that there are plausible arguments against cryonics, such as technological feasibility. But the "why bother saving people?" argument is both stupid and repugnant.
Also for a number of commenters in the linked thread, the true rejection seems to be, "By freezing yourself you are claiming that you deserve something no one else gets, in this case immortality."
This is almost identical to the argument against free-market medical care "Why should you get better treatment just because you can afford it?". I wonder how many commentators would agree with both arguments.
Heh. Any true-believer Christian would laugh at cryonics and point out that the way to everlasting life is much simpler -- just accept Jesus... X-D
Oh, and any true-believer Buddhist would be confused as to why would you want to linger on your way to enlightenment.
Yes, that's why Alcor is so expensive.
I find the idea of "true rejection" over-used. Many people, for many things, have more than one reason to reject them, and none of those reasons is the reason.
That would only make money because it hasn't been done before. Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money. A question asking what a future civilization would do about a frozen head implies asking what they would do for a typical frozen head. Being one of the first frozen heads they run across is very atypical, and carries a higher profit only because it is atypical.
It might also cost less money, because most of the cost might be R&D to work out how to resurrect someone, after which resurrecting each person is easy.
Continuing the Egypt analogy, each additional Egyptian artefact is less interesting than the previous one, yet people continued digging them up rather than just digging up the first few.
This does not seem psychologically realistic. Humans aren't built to arrive at conclusions through rational evaluation of multiple independent lines of evidence; rather, they choose their answer in advance for some reason or other (usually "this is weird" or "my tribe rejects this"), and only then begin cherry-picking arguments to support their conclusion.
This is true, but ignores skeptical_lurker's point that any civilization capable of resurrection is likely to be post-scarcity.
That seems to have an implied "... so every time I argue with a human, I should never assume that the human has more than one reason for something". I hope you can see how that will go seriously wrong when the human actually does have more than one reason, and particularly on LW-style topics.
If the civilization is post-scarcity, then making money from TV rights to the first Pharaoh is not useful as an analogy; the future civilization never does one thing because it gets them more of something than another thing does.
Absolute claims are almost never correct. Replace the "never" in your statement with "usually not, especially when discussing politically charged, or better yet, weird-sounding topics" and you've got yourself a deal.
You're refusing to address someone's stated argument, and in fact, are saying something that is nonresponsive if he means what he is actually saying.
Yes, sometimes you have to do that. But making it your default behavior when addressing all people in the real world who don't agree with you is a bad idea.
Who said anything about making it your default behavior? There's a difference between "many" and "most", and an even bigger difference between "many" and "all".
Presumably, the ease will change with time, tending easier until ceilings of possible economic and technological progress are reached. If it takes centuries for the procedure of resurrecting the cryopreserved to go from "experimental and expensive" to "cheap and routine", the old 21st-century cryo-patients can wait, they aren't getting any deader.