Assuming that this is mostly about persuading him to save himself by participating in cryonics (is that “the cause” for which he might be “an asset”?):
Your father may be fortunate to have so many informed people trying to change his mind about this. Not one person in a million has that.
He’s also already scientifically informed to a rare degree—relative to the average person—so it’s not as if he needs to hear arguments about nanobots and so forth.
So this has nothing to do with science, it’s about sensibility and philosophy of life.
Many middle-aged people have seen most of their dreams crushed by life. They will also be somewhere along the path of physical decline leading to death, despite their best efforts. All this has a way of hollowing out a person, and making the individual life appear futile.
Items 1 and 2 on your father’s list are the sort of consolations which may prove appealing to an intellectual, scientifically literate atheist, when contemplating possible attitudes towards life. Many such people, having faced some mix of success and failure in life, and looking ahead to personal oblivion (or, as they may see it, the great unknown of death), will find it a relief to abandon hope, and to broaden their awareness beyond their private desires, to the sweep of history or the vastness of the universe.
This impersonal perspective may function as a source of calm and lucidity, and to have you urging them to abandon their resignation and grasp for more life may seem like someone asking them to rush back into the cage of self-involved personal desire and occlude their hard-won awareness of reality in favor of optimistic delusion.
Also, they may simply find life boring or wearisome. Parents may endure mostly for the sake of their children, long past the age when the child supposedly grows up and leaves home. There may be far less joie de vivre there than a younger person could imagine; they may simply be going through the motions of life, having established some routine that leaves them as much space as possible after the turmoil of a youth in which they first came into bruising contact with the demands and limitations of life; and they may be kept alive more by habit than by the desire to live.
I know nothing about your father, so all that is just meant to suggest possibilities. I’ll mention one other factor, which is the story a person tells themselves about their own destiny. One person’s power is so limited, that simply choosing the broad direction of one’s own life is often a struggle and an accomplishment; I would even say it’s rare for a person to understand what their own life is about, and what’s going on in it, in a more than superficial way. A phase of life is usually understood afterwards, if at all. The powerlessness of the human individual, the sense that one’s time is running out, the impositions of the external world, all of this combines with everything I mentioned earlier to favor either passivity (stop trying, roll with the punches) or stubbornness, including intellectual stubbornness (at least I can live and think as I’ve already decided; at least I have that freedom and that power).
In persuading him to consider cryonics as a worthy activity, I would wager that something like all that is really what you have to deal with—though of course he also has a point when he asks whether making a copy is the same thing as surviving. I am young enough, and my estimation of the rate of change is rapid enough, that I mostly think in terms of rejuvenation, rather than cryonic suspension, as my path to an open future. It remains to be seen if I will ever bother making arrangements to be frozen.
Anyway, I would suggest two practical steps. One is to think together about the logistics, financial and otherwise, that would be required if he was to sign up for cryonics. How much would it cost, is there an opportunity cost, what would the physical process be if he died now and was shipped off to suspension. The point of such discussion is to explore what difference it would make to his existing life to take this step.
The other is to think about the further future if you both were to live to see it. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that we don’t have a Star Trek-like TV series in which the spacefaring 22nd century is full of youthful survivors from the 20th century who happened to be last until the age of advanced nanobiotechnology; it would encourage more people to take the future personally. Anyway, the key is to try to be realistic. Don’t imagine the future to be some sort of wish-fulfilment video game; try to think of it as history that hasn’t happened yet. On the day-to-day level, life is full of repetition, but in modern times, even just on a scale of decades, we also see catastrophe and transformation. Try to think of the future as a series of crises and triumphs continuous with the historical stages we already have behind us, and which you might manage to personally live through. This is a way to tap into the belated wisdom and sense of reality which comes from having lived a few decades as an adult, without entirely easing back into the spectator’s armchair of death.
I can’t tell from your post if he’s actually dying right now, or if it’s just that he’s older than you and so notionally closer to death. This line of thought, about staying in the game of life for a few more decades, is more suited to awakening someone’s sense of personal agency with respect to the future. If he’s dying right now, then it probably does come down to a debate about personal identity.
Perhaps it’s unfortunate that we don’t have a Star Trek-like TV series in which the spacefaring 22nd century is full of youthful survivors from the 20th century who happened to be last until the age of advanced nanobiotechnology; it would encourage more people to take the future personally.
This is kind of a brilliant idea. Given that television futures always resemble the culture and the period they were produced anyway, why not actually embrace that?
I don’t think this would work. Consider the death cultism of doomsayers for arbitrary future dates. (e.g. radical ecologists) Consider how people act not regarding to cryogenics but to rather simple and excepted ways of increasing life span. Not smoking, limited drinking. Safety issues.
The own death is just not NEAR enough to factor in to decision making.
There are fun shows set in the near future that are nice and decent. But that does not really change the notion of having ones own time set in some kind of fortunistic way.
The reality that the chances for dying are modifiable is not that easily accepted.
I have young and bright people tell me how dying is not an issue for them, since they will just be dead and feel nothing about it. Its a big scale UGH humans carry around.
Anyone around here know how to pitch a TV series?
Be a producer or big scale writer on another TV series. Keep in mind that narratives are sold on interesting characters and plot. The background of a society is not of particular importance. The current trend is for darker&edgier, after the shiny world of Star Trek.
You might enjoy reading the TVTropes tropes on immortality.
What about Futurama? Or is that not suitable because, as a comedy, it’s more cynical and brings up both the way the future would be somewhat disturbing for us and that it’s likely our descendents would be more interested in only reviving famous historical figures and sticking their heads in museums.
The comic Transmetropolitan also brings up the issue of cryogenics “revivals” effectively being confined to nursing homes out of our total shock at the weirdness of the future and inability to cope. It’s an interesting series for transhumanists, given that it has people uploading themselves into swarms of nanobots, and the idea of a small “preseve” for techno-libertarians to generate whatever technologies they want (“The hell was that?” “It’s the local news, sent directly to your brain via nanopollen!” “Wasn’t that banned when it was found to build up in the synapses and cause alzheimer’s?” “We think we’ve ironed out the bugs...”)
Assuming that this is mostly about persuading him to save himself by participating in cryonics (is that “the cause” for which he might be “an asset”?):
Your father may be fortunate to have so many informed people trying to change his mind about this. Not one person in a million has that.
He’s also already scientifically informed to a rare degree—relative to the average person—so it’s not as if he needs to hear arguments about nanobots and so forth.
So this has nothing to do with science, it’s about sensibility and philosophy of life.
Many middle-aged people have seen most of their dreams crushed by life. They will also be somewhere along the path of physical decline leading to death, despite their best efforts. All this has a way of hollowing out a person, and making the individual life appear futile.
Items 1 and 2 on your father’s list are the sort of consolations which may prove appealing to an intellectual, scientifically literate atheist, when contemplating possible attitudes towards life. Many such people, having faced some mix of success and failure in life, and looking ahead to personal oblivion (or, as they may see it, the great unknown of death), will find it a relief to abandon hope, and to broaden their awareness beyond their private desires, to the sweep of history or the vastness of the universe.
This impersonal perspective may function as a source of calm and lucidity, and to have you urging them to abandon their resignation and grasp for more life may seem like someone asking them to rush back into the cage of self-involved personal desire and occlude their hard-won awareness of reality in favor of optimistic delusion.
Also, they may simply find life boring or wearisome. Parents may endure mostly for the sake of their children, long past the age when the child supposedly grows up and leaves home. There may be far less joie de vivre there than a younger person could imagine; they may simply be going through the motions of life, having established some routine that leaves them as much space as possible after the turmoil of a youth in which they first came into bruising contact with the demands and limitations of life; and they may be kept alive more by habit than by the desire to live.
I know nothing about your father, so all that is just meant to suggest possibilities. I’ll mention one other factor, which is the story a person tells themselves about their own destiny. One person’s power is so limited, that simply choosing the broad direction of one’s own life is often a struggle and an accomplishment; I would even say it’s rare for a person to understand what their own life is about, and what’s going on in it, in a more than superficial way. A phase of life is usually understood afterwards, if at all. The powerlessness of the human individual, the sense that one’s time is running out, the impositions of the external world, all of this combines with everything I mentioned earlier to favor either passivity (stop trying, roll with the punches) or stubbornness, including intellectual stubbornness (at least I can live and think as I’ve already decided; at least I have that freedom and that power).
In persuading him to consider cryonics as a worthy activity, I would wager that something like all that is really what you have to deal with—though of course he also has a point when he asks whether making a copy is the same thing as surviving. I am young enough, and my estimation of the rate of change is rapid enough, that I mostly think in terms of rejuvenation, rather than cryonic suspension, as my path to an open future. It remains to be seen if I will ever bother making arrangements to be frozen.
Anyway, I would suggest two practical steps. One is to think together about the logistics, financial and otherwise, that would be required if he was to sign up for cryonics. How much would it cost, is there an opportunity cost, what would the physical process be if he died now and was shipped off to suspension. The point of such discussion is to explore what difference it would make to his existing life to take this step.
The other is to think about the further future if you both were to live to see it. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that we don’t have a Star Trek-like TV series in which the spacefaring 22nd century is full of youthful survivors from the 20th century who happened to be last until the age of advanced nanobiotechnology; it would encourage more people to take the future personally. Anyway, the key is to try to be realistic. Don’t imagine the future to be some sort of wish-fulfilment video game; try to think of it as history that hasn’t happened yet. On the day-to-day level, life is full of repetition, but in modern times, even just on a scale of decades, we also see catastrophe and transformation. Try to think of the future as a series of crises and triumphs continuous with the historical stages we already have behind us, and which you might manage to personally live through. This is a way to tap into the belated wisdom and sense of reality which comes from having lived a few decades as an adult, without entirely easing back into the spectator’s armchair of death.
I can’t tell from your post if he’s actually dying right now, or if it’s just that he’s older than you and so notionally closer to death. This line of thought, about staying in the game of life for a few more decades, is more suited to awakening someone’s sense of personal agency with respect to the future. If he’s dying right now, then it probably does come down to a debate about personal identity.
This is kind of a brilliant idea. Given that television futures always resemble the culture and the period they were produced anyway, why not actually embrace that?
And, as you say, it has an educational use.
Anyone around here know how to pitch a TV series?
I don’t think this would work. Consider the death cultism of doomsayers for arbitrary future dates. (e.g. radical ecologists) Consider how people act not regarding to cryogenics but to rather simple and excepted ways of increasing life span. Not smoking, limited drinking. Safety issues. The own death is just not NEAR enough to factor in to decision making. There are fun shows set in the near future that are nice and decent. But that does not really change the notion of having ones own time set in some kind of fortunistic way. The reality that the chances for dying are modifiable is not that easily accepted.
I have young and bright people tell me how dying is not an issue for them, since they will just be dead and feel nothing about it. Its a big scale UGH humans carry around.
Be a producer or big scale writer on another TV series. Keep in mind that narratives are sold on interesting characters and plot. The background of a society is not of particular importance. The current trend is for darker&edgier, after the shiny world of Star Trek.
You might enjoy reading the TVTropes tropes on immortality.
To an extent Futurama does this with their heads in jars.
What about Futurama? Or is that not suitable because, as a comedy, it’s more cynical and brings up both the way the future would be somewhat disturbing for us and that it’s likely our descendents would be more interested in only reviving famous historical figures and sticking their heads in museums.
The comic Transmetropolitan also brings up the issue of cryogenics “revivals” effectively being confined to nursing homes out of our total shock at the weirdness of the future and inability to cope. It’s an interesting series for transhumanists, given that it has people uploading themselves into swarms of nanobots, and the idea of a small “preseve” for techno-libertarians to generate whatever technologies they want (“The hell was that?” “It’s the local news, sent directly to your brain via nanopollen!” “Wasn’t that banned when it was found to build up in the synapses and cause alzheimer’s?” “We think we’ve ironed out the bugs...”)