it's worse than you think. We routinely torture people behind the veneer of medicine just so that healthy people don't have to feel icky about death.
Do we? We make people stay alive a long time and in a lot of pain unless they ask really loud not to. Even if you think that's torture, adding morphine solves that. (It does not solve the sacrifice of resources that buy more QALYs.) What are you thinking of?
So being signed up for cryonics shifts my views on life and death, as might be expected.
In particular, it focuses my views of success on the preservation of my brain (everything else too, just in case, but especially the brain). This means, obviously, not just the lump of meat but also the information within it.
If I'm suffering a degenerative disease to that meat or its information, I'm going to want to cryocide to preserve the information (and the idea of living through slow brain death doesn't thrill me regardless).
What I don't know is: given the current state of science, what sorts of things do I need to be worried about?
In particular, I'm wondering about Alzheimer's; does it appear to be damage to the information, or to the retrieval mechanism?
But any other such diseases interest me in this context.
Thanks!
-Robin