because you believe humanity needs to move forward and get over the Death thing
In the end, this sort of rhetoric is false. Cryonics offers you more time, that’s all. “Something or other must make an end of you some day… Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough”, as George Bernard Shaw put it in his own immortalist essay. More time to look for genuine immortality, if you wish, but that search has no scientific argument behind it remotely comparable to the argument for reversibility of cryostasis. A chance to reach a Friendly Singularity and become more than human in presently inconceivable ways—I imagine that is also a consideration for anyone who has thought about superintelligence. But it’s still not immortality.
What cryonics, especially coupled with the Singularity perspective, might allow you to “get over” are certain crude forms of resignation to being what you are and of ending as everyone else has always ended. But to call it a triumph over Death, with a capital D, as if it were the overcoming of death in all its forms, is to inflate justified revolutionary expectations into unjustified transcendental ones.
But I’m still very happy about this development, and just wrote to Paris to say so.
because you believe humanity needs to move forward and get over the Death thing
In the end, this sort of rhetoric is false. Cryonics offers you more time, that’s all. “Something or other must make an end of you some day… Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough”, as George Bernard Shaw put it in his own immortalist essay. More time to look for genuine immortality, if you wish, but that search has no scientific argument behind it remotely comparable to the argument for reversibility of cryostasis. A chance to reach a Friendly Singularity and become more than human in presently inconceivable ways—I imagine that is also a consideration for anyone who has thought about superintelligence. But it’s still not immortality.
What cryonics, especially coupled with the Singularity perspective, might allow you to “get over” are certain crude forms of resignation to being what you are and of ending as everyone else has always ended. But to call it a triumph over Death, with a capital D, as if it were the overcoming of death in all its forms, is to inflate justified revolutionary expectations into unjustified transcendental ones.
But I’m still very happy about this development, and just wrote to Paris to say so.