I suspect that cryonics won’t catch on in the atheist/skeptic/humanist community, if ever, until enough people with status in it think they invented it.
Currently these fellows view cryonics as an assault on the common sense and moral intuitions about death we absorb at an uncritical stage in our cognitive development, along with religious doctrines which tend to reinforce them. (See the New England Primer for a famous historical example.) To them we say something which sounds like, “Xerxes the Great did die,/But cryonicists say not I.”
We still have Larry King in the queue, possibly. I encourage him to follow through on his plans for cryotransport, despite the fact that for a celebrity, a lot of people apparently don’t like him.
While I think that cryonics in principle could make sense, and I don’t share the intuitive problems with it, in practice I belief that the changes to be resurrected in a sort-of continued existence is very, very small. In terms of life expectancy, resources spent in other ways seem to have a higher utility.
Now, I may very well be wrong (I’m certainly no expert on the latest in cryonics research), but do you think there is any realistic chance for cryonic success, given the technology of, say, the next twenty years?
Do you mean: ...realistic chance to restore, within the next 20 years, an otherwise-dead-but-cryonically-preserved brain in such a way as to preserve the associated person’s continued existence? or:
…realistic chance to preserve, within the next 20 years, an otherwise-dead brain in such a way that it can at some later time be restored with the associated person’s continued existence preserved?
I think the chances for the former are very, very small; the latter chance is slightly better (there could of course be some technical breakthrough), but let’s say I wouldn’t bet my life on that either...
Again, I’m no expert in these matters, and I’d be delighted to see some research that shows I’m overly pessimistic.
Of course, most cryonics advocates don’t recommend having oneself cryonically preserved as an alternative to actually living one’s life, merely as an alternative to having oneself burned to ash or buried in the dirt after one dies, both of which seem like even worse bets.
If I take “not rich” to mean unable to afford cryonic suspension without giving up other things that contribute significantly to my QALY-count, agreed. That said, that seems like a pretty low threshold for “rich.”
I belong to the We-Have-to-Get-Off-Butts-And-Make-Cryonics-Work School, which makes the usual probability approach pretty useless. Thomas Donaldson wrote that if treat our current choices as the “seeds” of future events, then probability becomes something which we can start to control in our favor.
I suspect that cryonics won’t catch on in the atheist/skeptic/humanist community, if ever, until enough people with status in it think they invented it.
Currently these fellows view cryonics as an assault on the common sense and moral intuitions about death we absorb at an uncritical stage in our cognitive development, along with religious doctrines which tend to reinforce them. (See the New England Primer for a famous historical example.) To them we say something which sounds like, “Xerxes the Great did die,/But cryonicists say not I.”
We still have Larry King in the queue, possibly. I encourage him to follow through on his plans for cryotransport, despite the fact that for a celebrity, a lot of people apparently don’t like him.
While I think that cryonics in principle could make sense, and I don’t share the intuitive problems with it, in practice I belief that the changes to be resurrected in a sort-of continued existence is very, very small. In terms of life expectancy, resources spent in other ways seem to have a higher utility.
Now, I may very well be wrong (I’m certainly no expert on the latest in cryonics research), but do you think there is any realistic chance for cryonic success, given the technology of, say, the next twenty years?
Do you mean:
...realistic chance to restore, within the next 20 years, an otherwise-dead-but-cryonically-preserved brain in such a way as to preserve the associated person’s continued existence?
or: …realistic chance to preserve, within the next 20 years, an otherwise-dead brain in such a way that it can at some later time be restored with the associated person’s continued existence preserved?
I think the chances for the former are very, very small; the latter chance is slightly better (there could of course be some technical breakthrough), but let’s say I wouldn’t bet my life on that either...
Again, I’m no expert in these matters, and I’d be delighted to see some research that shows I’m overly pessimistic.
Of course, most cryonics advocates don’t recommend having oneself cryonically preserved as an alternative to actually living one’s life, merely as an alternative to having oneself burned to ash or buried in the dirt after one dies, both of which seem like even worse bets.
They’re cheaper. If cryonics has a <1% chance of working and you’re not rich they likely yield more QALYs.
If I take “not rich” to mean unable to afford cryonic suspension without giving up other things that contribute significantly to my QALY-count, agreed. That said, that seems like a pretty low threshold for “rich.”
I belong to the We-Have-to-Get-Off-Butts-And-Make-Cryonics-Work School, which makes the usual probability approach pretty useless. Thomas Donaldson wrote that if treat our current choices as the “seeds” of future events, then probability becomes something which we can start to control in our favor.
http://www.alcor.org/printable.cgi?fname=Library%2Fhtml%2Fprobability.html
Why?