I am always torn between thinking: Eh, it's harmless, who am I to judge what makes other people happy to believe about the afterlife, and maybe their enthusiasm will fund some research that will turn out to be useful later. Or: Sheesh, what a lousy opportunity cost, both individually and socially.
I find myself eager to discuss costs and benefits. Is it more wasteful of resource, would one suppose, than the occupation of 96 cubic feet of land for 100+ years?
I don't see any individual opportunity cost - surely people spend money on much more silly things.
Depends on what budget it comes out of, I suppose, since even though money is fungible we don't treat it that way.
Naively I might suppose it would come out of one's medical budget in place of extensive end-of-life care. If you think the marginal dollar in such medicine produces little value, you might not think this a bad tradeoff.
More cynically I can imagine it serving as a substitute for charity, since they both involve benefiting persons who are distant in space and/or time.
I dont understand how anything else was discussed at this dinner.
I also have trouble imagining that, were this to work, you could avoid wacky woody allen hijinks. THAT'S your afterlife?
In the future, chocolate fudge and deep fat will be health foods!
I don't ask much else from the future, just let me have that.
4: I dont understand how anything else was discussed at this dinner.
For me this would be like the (New Yorker?) cartoon where a couple are walking up to house with a huge statue of a dog out front and the wife is saying, "Whatever you do, don't bring up dogs."
9: Exactly. Plus, I was barely keeping from snickering as it was, and I do strive to be polite.
If your grand plan for achieving immortality is being resurrected as a head in a bucket ala Futurama, you're just as well off believing in resurrection through Jesus -- makes as much sense.
In general, I don't think the cryonics business is all that likely to work out well for the customer. OTOH it's apparently pretty fun to work at a cryonics lab, in a macabre sort of way, so he'll be making people happy. That's something.
Dupe and boor though this dude may be, though, he was right about the mussels vs. oysters question, you know. It's like asking what the difference is between ducks and chickens because they're both birds. Shame on you, Stanley. For. Shame.
(Wow, those files at the TAL site don't work very well...)
Good morning, amigos! I still have an internet connection!
11: It's something of a more realistic plan than, say, being burned to ashes, or being left in the ground to rot, though.
12: I would really like a reliable 3rd party account, but that article is not convincing. Some of the things mentioned are things anyone interested in cryo should already know about from reading the published materials (e.g. brain-only, drilling holes in the head, etc.). But the description of these is so sensationalized, with so little context or real information, that I am disinclined to trust the descriptions of things I don't already know about.
I should have said "plausible" rather than "realistic". Since "realistic" is obviously contested by MW.
15.2: The article is describing the contents of Larry Johnson's book, so technically, it's the book you'll want to be finding refutations of.
I know a number of cryonics fans. They range from absolutely certain that they'll be revived in a hundred years or so to viewing it as a long shot but worth the money on the off chance they'll get to be immortal.
Personally I'd like to be recycled - organs transplanted, muscle eaten, skull turned into a drinking cup for satanic rituals.
But the description of these is so sensationalized, with so little context or real information, that I am disinclined to trust the descriptions of things I don't already know about.
I hear that S&P has put out a warning on that revitalization bonds might need to be downgraded.
This 2010 New Yorker article on the cryonics nutcases was pretty good, I thought. It sounds as though you have a very, very poor chance of the machinery's continuing to work as promised, let alone the miraculous defrosting and immortality etc.
I don't understand what makes people think the future wants them. Would you want your epoch cluttered up with the kind of people who had their heads frozen? I think I'd just quietly close the freezer door and go have a future-beer.
OT but at least it rhymes with the post title: Another less-than-an-hour commute, and I spent six miles of it chatting with some upper Manhattan biking advocate who decided he wanted to socialize on the way to work. And there was an occasional headwind -- not terrible, but not a tailwind.
Preen, preen, preen. Admittedly, I still haven't broken 59 minutes, but when I do, you'll all hear about it.
From spleen, spleen, spleen to preen, preen, preen in under 24 hours!
17: Yes, I suppose I should actually read the book. The New Yorker article was good, but focused on things specific to the Cryonics Institute. Alcor is the more upscale option, so it might or might not have some of the same problems.
21: Are you assuming it would always cost a lot to bring someone back? If you expect the future to be richer than the present, they might want to spend some of their riches to help people who would rather be alive than not. Obviously we don't spend 100% of our surplus resources on saving lives right now, but people have been known to give to charity & medical research altruistically. Even to rare diseases that only affect a small number of people.
I don't think that people with, for example, cystic fibrosis are narcissistic for wanting to be treated and/or cured, or for expecting that people will tolerate their continued existence if a cure is found. (Yes, there is a difference, cryo people are asking for more life than most people get now, but it's not like they're shoving anyone else off the boat, and opportunity cost is not unique to cryo.)
And wouldn't it be interesting right now to have a tiny number of people alive who could remember, say, 1700? Why should people in 2300 feel any differently about us?
The dynamic would change somewhat if a lot of people signed up, but I don't think that's in any danger of happening soon.
20: I'm thinking of these people being like the would-be aviators in old film clips jumping off of barns with wings attached. Something similar to your aim is going to happen in the not-too-distant future, but it is going to happen in a very different way.
27 is probably right. It's quite possible that freezing heads will be no more helpful than mummification. Still, knowing only what they knew then, mummification was a good try, as head-freezing is now. Unfortunately, reality doesn't give partial credit for a good effort, you only get credit for doing something that works. Whether or not that's actually possible.
I love how the big hurdle in bringing someone out of cryo will be fixing the damage from being frozen. Hey, we found the cure for your pancreatic cancer but we're still a bit stumped on the whole "ruptured every cell in your body" thing.
29: "ruptured every cell" may be an exaggeration given the state of the art, see here for an account of a whole kidney that was frozen, unfrozen, and reintegrated into an animal:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
But yes it very well may be more difficult to undo damage due to the cryo process than whatever was the underlying cause of death. Of course in the case of brain-only cryo this is obviously true, as the body isn't even there anymore. And yes there is some irony there.
To drag ethics into another thread, I can't think of a way to deal with the dead besides cremation or cast-out-to-sea that squares with the categorical imperative. Certainly not everyone can be frozen and stored, let alone given a dedicated cube of dirt to occupy forever and ever. What makes you so special, Popsicle Boy?
If there were enough vultures to go around, I like the exposure-for-vultures-to-pick-at route. I can't think of any way to arrange it without a cultural support structure, but if I could, that's what I'd go for. (Also, creates maximum clean usable skeletons for Halloween decor.)
If you expect the future to be richer than the present, they might want to spend some of their riches to help people who would rather be alive than not.
I expect that a great many people of that time will be disappointed in their wish to have one reasonably pleasant life. If they bring people from this era back, it will be to yell at them for being so stupid.
33: Or worse, like when the jerk who invented work gets revived.
If vultures aren't your thing, I'm sure there are some needy wolf packs that would be happy to accept donations.
Lynxes are cute and fluffy, I wonder if they could be obtained as funereal scavengers. Or bobcats. I'm not fussy.
36. What's the difference? I thought a bobcat as a type of lynx, or vice versa. Either way, cuter than vultures.
36: Downside is, you might end up in purrgatory.
They're very close to the same thing, but lynxes have some adaptations for snow -- bigger feet to stay on top of the surface of the snow, and I think slightly different ears. Also, different coloring for the different environments.
If only we knew someone with a pig farm.
I tend to think that if someone these people are ever revived, it will work out more or less as in Transmetropolitan, ie not very well. Perhaps slightly less future shock, but maybe not. Old people seem to have enough trouble adapting to current technology and social mores - how do they expect to cope with a world that has the technology and the will to effectively reanimate the dead?
To be fair, even young people will have trouble adjusting to fighting to the death in a post-apocalyptic colloseum as a specimen of primitive, unmutated man.
I wouldn't mind a trip through the beetle drawer, but I'd much prefer to be planted under a new apple tree in my mother's orchard. Good nutrients in these here bones, might as well put them to use, and the time, distance, and nutrient cycles between my body and the food use should be quite safe. It isn't any kind of legal, though: you have to set aside something like an acre of land and a solid sum of money to make a new cemetary.
31: The trouble with bringing in the categorical imperative is that it can always cut both ways - it just depends on which aspect of the action you see as accidental, and which aspect you see as universalizable.
For example if everyone always insists on monopolizing a certain amount of resources after they're dead, then it's quite possible that we will run out of stuff. On the other hand, if everyone behaved in such a way as to maximize their long-term probability of survival, we would have solved a lot of important world problems a long time ago. I would expect less war, less nuclear proliferation, better environmental stewardship, etc.
Alternately, as long as the marginal cryo subject reduces average costs (via economies of scale) it may be Kantianly acceptable to go for it, since that's what the currently frozen would have wished.
We really don't know what the future will need more of and what it will need less of. Maybe they will just chuck recoverable frozen brains in the trash, or turn them into Soylent Green. On the other hand, maybe distinct minds will be a scarce resource worth harvesting. Medieval scribes economized on parchment by overwriting old books. We have plenty of writing surfaces nowadays, there's no parchment shortage, but we would really like to know what some of those old books said.
Medical dissection appears to be the burial preference of my immediate family. So why mess with tradition!
I would just like to say that this TAL episode (assuming there aren't two about cryonics?) gave me extreme willies when I first heard it. I have a tender panic spot for stories which unfold excruciatingly slowly, inevitably, downhill, where the main character is still trying the hold the charade together. This was all that plus ghastly.