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Comment author: advancedatheist 02 September 2014 12:20:22AM 0 points [-]

Cryonics publicity, and my responses, part 1 of 2:

For $200,000, This Lab Will Swap Your Body's Blood for Antifreeze

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/for-200000-this-lab-will-swap-your-bodys-blood-for-antifreeze/379074/

And just a few days later:

Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/

As usually happens when these sorts of stories go online and people can post comments on them, I notice certain recurrent themes:

  1. Only rich people can afford cryonics.

  2. Signing up for cryonics signals selfishness.

  3. Something spooky happens when the human brain enters the off-state that resists technological interventions and attempts at reversibility.

  4. Cryonics organizations engage in deliberate fraud.

These cover the main points, and they show how badly the idea of cryonics still fails to communicate 50 years after Robert Ettinger published his first book about it, The Prospect of Immortality, in 1964. The people who currently have a say in the cryonics movement (I don’t have that kind of authority – yet – though I have attrition working in my favor) just don’t seem concerned about this, either, which I find worrisome.

I would like to offer my responses to these “objections.”

  1. A few wealthy people have signed up for cryonics. I have met one of them, namely, Mr. Don Laughlin, who founded his own casino and resort business in Laughlin, Nevada. In fact, Mr. Laughlin will host the End Death Cryonics Convention this November: http://venturist.info/end-death---cryonics-convention-november-2014.html

But in general cryonics attracts a mostly middle-class, mostly male demographic which uses life insurance as the funding mechanism, and this practice makes cryonics affordable. (For some reason this fact doesn’t register when it shows up in plain sight in cryonics news stories.)

And we can see that few wealthy men have signed up because:

a. The things that only wealthy people can afford tend to become status symbols and ways of showing conspicuous consumption; this hasn’t happened to cryonics, at least not yet, despite the envy-based misconceptions about it.

b. Cryonics hasn’t attracted adventuresses. Young, attractive single women with a certain kind of personality can identify congregations of wealthy men, like the ones who own sports franchises, their rich buddies and their well-paid athletes, and they will try to insinuate themselves to see if they can exploit these situations for financial gain. This hasn’t happened to the cryonics community so far; if anything, cryonics acts like “female Kryptonite.”

  1. The “selfishness” claim about cryonics apparently involves the fact that we cryonicists want something very badly which doesn’t exist in our century, so we have to take a metaphorical ambulance ride to the future, at considerable expense (usually paid for with life insurance), to try to reach it. If the people living in, say, the 24th Century, have solved the problems of radical life extension and the revival of cryonauts in a healthy state, and if they have socially normalized this as the current state of health care, they won’t go around complaining about each other’s “selfishness” for taking advantage of these techniques. I doubt they would disparage the revivable cryonauts who have arrived in the cryo-ambulance to their time, either. If anything, they will probably value cryonics, or a successor technology which accomplishes something similar, because they might have to resort to it themselves in case the practitioners of 24th Century medicine can’t treat their diseases and disabilities, and they want to get second opinions from the health care providers in, say, the 27th Century, based on the gamble that they have become capable enough to handle the untreatable medical issues of the 24th Century. You could view cryonicists as early adopters, not only of future standards of health care, but also of the different kind of moral philosophy that this health care will support.

  2. Even many allegedly secular people assume that something spooky happens when the human brain enters the neurological off-state we call “death”; this outcome shows inexorable Fate at work, or something. But this belief only reflects the fact that the so-called “modern” secular philosophies like revived Epicureanism, secular humanism, skepticism, ideological atheism and so forth arose during earlier stages of scientific knowledge. (The literature published by American Atheists still carries Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s credo that “Atheism,” as she capitalized it, derives from “Greek materialism.” Talk about living in the past.) The adherents of these secular philosophies need to catch up to the 21st Century by reading up on the advances in neuroscience promoted by the Brain Preservation Foundation. Fortunately two prominent figures in skeptic circles, Michael Shermer and Susan Blackmore, have associated with the Brain Preservation Foundation as advisers, so these two secular intellectuals at least show a willingness to think like 21st Century people by examining the evidence for ways to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state through applied neuroscience.

  3. Fraud? I’d like to know who has gotten rich off of cryonics. Name that individual.

End of part 1 of 2.

Comment author: advancedatheist 02 September 2014 12:21:14AM *  0 points [-]

Cryonics publicity, and my responses, part 2 of 2.

  1. Eldritch horrors, or at least dickish Future People, will do mean things to cryonauts upon their revival. (Sounds familiar, for some reason.)

  2. We shouldn't do cryonics because of what happens in dumb popular culture like Idiocracy, Futurama, Star Trek, etc.

  3. You won’t know anyone upon revival in Future World.

Resuming:

  1. The cryonics idea, because in involves an unusual way of talking about “death” (the neurological off-state), pushes people’s terror management buttons. According the Terror Management Theory in psychology, when we learn about our mortality as children, the knowledge causes a kind of chronic traumatic stress disorder which we spend the rest of our lives managing, in a kludgy way, by constructing and maintaining anxiety buffers which deny death: things like self-esteem, beliefs in human exceptionalism, tribal identity, afterlife fantasies and so forth. And we all know that people think badly under the influence of strong emotions, in this case reminders of death which Terror Management theorists call mortality salience. (When denial of death can actually keep people from dying, we call it “effective health care.”) Cryonics offers a strategy for managing our risk instead of our terror, but most people don’t immediately see that without some amount of explanation, often spoon-fed to the slower learners (and even then they may not catch on); so they construct frankly absurd scenarios about all the bad things that they fear might happen to them, assuming revival.

Many of these faux objections sound like expressions of social anxiety to me (I know about social anxiety from my own experiences) – these Advanced Beings in the Future will do horrible things to me, so I would rather die than meet them! I have to wonder if we have social science instruments to correlate people’s reactions to the cryonics idea with measurable anxiety levels and see if we can find less anxious demographics which cryonics organizations could try marketing to.

  1. Unserious people invoke pop culture crap like Futurama, a cartoon series which seemed funny to me for about four or five episodes before I lost interest in it. I don’t even bother engaging such individuals.

The episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation, titled “The Neutral Zone,” brings up an addressable point, however. In this episode, Dr. Crusher revives a cryopreserved financier who gives a performance which makes me wonder if the screenwriters knew a real cryonicist with money and used him as a model. The character’s personality seemed to have a lot of verisimilitude to me, in other words. This character tries to find what had happened to the investments he had set aside in trusts on Earth, only to discover that his wealth has mysteriously disappeared without explanation.

Now, this could happen given some major economic, social or political disruption, I suppose. But in the real world, trusts have lasted for generations without anyone stealing them empty. H.G. Wells even wrote the first story connecting suspended animation and exponentially compounding wealth in trusts early in the 20th Century, both as a short story and as a novel, under the names “When the Sleeper Wakes” and The Sleeper Awakes, respectively. People have left wealth in trusts which have lasted for a century or more where trustees have preserved their assets and faithfully carried out the trustors’ wishes, subject to interpretation in case a trustor leaves ambiguous instructions. And we can point to well known examples of trusts established in the late 17th Century by Benjamin Franklin, and in the 19th Century by Stephen Girard, James Smithson and Alfred Nobel. You could probably include charitable trusts set up early in the 20th Century by John Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Andrew Mellon as additional examples of successful asset preservation across the decades.

In other words, in the real world, trustees generally don’t loot and make trusts disappear just because the trustors died decades ago and they think no one cares any more. So the people who bring up this scenario for the assets cryonicists have set aside in speculative revival trusts, like in the Star Trek episode, simply show their ignorance of trusts’ historical track record.

  1. What happens to people now when they discover that they don’t know anyone? This sounds like another kind of objection to cryonics based on social anxiety. Have they lost their ability to make new friends? I haven’t maintained friendships with anyone I knew in the first 30 years of my life. I’ve also lost several of my relatives already, including all of my grandparents; my 87 year old father could die any day now.

How many people have I at least met who have gone into cryo? Probably more than a dozen, and I got to know David Zubkoff well because we worked together for a year in the late 1990’s.

Do I feel alienated because of all the people I can no longer communicate with? No, because I have made new friends, even in the past couple of years. And no one would characterize me as outgoing or extroverted, by any means. If people have the capacity to make new friends throughout life, then why wouldn’t that continue to operate in the future?

If anything, you might even find it easier to make friends in Future World if the people of that time have enhanced empathy and social skills so that they can pick up on your tells more readily and adjust their responses to you to make you comfortable with them.

If you’ve run across similar ill-considered objections to cryonics, how have you addressed them?

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