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.