Just like joining a cult that promises a post-mortem reward, signing up for cryonics means that anyone who (used to) respect you is forced to evaluate your evidence for doing so, or else save themselves the effort by calling you crazy. I think anti-cryonics backlash is a byproduct of an anti-cult heuristic.
People are even further annoyed when a cult promises that the evidence necessary to convince a thinking person to believe is available now and not just after death—that they’re not asking you to take anything on faith (often, this turns out to be a lie).
HDM (which I understand as: people value current rituals around the disposal of corpses) is a good concept and also explains the rest of the anti-cryonics revulsion. I don’t agree that lawyers and writers have anything to fear (yet), or that doctors have anything at stake (yet) unless they choose to make a bet on the likely future of cryonics.
The HDM includes the notion that death can be easily determined by experiment in the here and now. So the idea that a brainwave or heartbeat is something that once lost (or once absent for 10 minutes, etc.) is part of it. My thought is that doctors get a certain amount of social status when they are able to give an unambiguous answer on the topic of whether someone is “too far gone” or not.
Lawyers deal with words on paper that say whether someone was dead or not at a specified time. While there’s not a technical problem with differentiating legal death from say, moral death, the fact that the HDM more or less corresponds to legal death doubtless makes it easier for such things to be processed.
Writers have to relate their stories to the audience, so if they try to make death a totally bad/avoidable/ambiguous thing there is a high probability they won’t connect with the audience. Morals about how evil it is to grasp for immortality are by contrast a highly popular fantasy trope.
The essential threat is to the comfort level of a large number of people. Their entire notion of death is fuzzy, instinctive, and full of prescientific influences and outdated concepts.
I wonder if Harry Potter would have run into backlash—I mean a wider backlash—if at the end of Philosopher’s Stone, the (good-aligned) alchemist who made the Stone had been reported to be still living as a happy immortal rather than deciding to quit peacefully.
Just like joining a cult that promises a post-mortem reward, signing up for cryonics means that anyone who (used to) respect you is forced to evaluate your evidence for doing so, or else save themselves the effort by calling you crazy. I think anti-cryonics backlash is a byproduct of an anti-cult heuristic.
People are even further annoyed when a cult promises that the evidence necessary to convince a thinking person to believe is available now and not just after death—that they’re not asking you to take anything on faith (often, this turns out to be a lie).
HDM (which I understand as: people value current rituals around the disposal of corpses) is a good concept and also explains the rest of the anti-cryonics revulsion. I don’t agree that lawyers and writers have anything to fear (yet), or that doctors have anything at stake (yet) unless they choose to make a bet on the likely future of cryonics.
The HDM includes the notion that death can be easily determined by experiment in the here and now. So the idea that a brainwave or heartbeat is something that once lost (or once absent for 10 minutes, etc.) is part of it. My thought is that doctors get a certain amount of social status when they are able to give an unambiguous answer on the topic of whether someone is “too far gone” or not.
Lawyers deal with words on paper that say whether someone was dead or not at a specified time. While there’s not a technical problem with differentiating legal death from say, moral death, the fact that the HDM more or less corresponds to legal death doubtless makes it easier for such things to be processed.
Writers have to relate their stories to the audience, so if they try to make death a totally bad/avoidable/ambiguous thing there is a high probability they won’t connect with the audience. Morals about how evil it is to grasp for immortality are by contrast a highly popular fantasy trope.
The essential threat is to the comfort level of a large number of people. Their entire notion of death is fuzzy, instinctive, and full of prescientific influences and outdated concepts.
I think you mean this trope.
I wonder if Harry Potter would have run into backlash—I mean a wider backlash—if at the end of Philosopher’s Stone, the (good-aligned) alchemist who made the Stone had been reported to be still living as a happy immortal rather than deciding to quit peacefully.