Maybe it goes like this: For most people, death is considered to be final and unescapable. Cryonics is thought of closely related to death. Thus cryonics’ promise to bring people back from freezing is seen with a much higher level of scepticism than warranted.
Yes. Cultural memes around death seem to make cryonics seem unrealistic or even downright rebellious against cultural norms. Frequently I hear people say “If someone wants to freeze their corpse as their last wishes I support that right.” But they are already calling the patient a corpse and referring to the vitrification process as freezing. So it’s kind of a back-handed endorsement as far as cryonics rights go.
Maybe part of the problem is that alternate labels to “corpse” and “freezing” are too complex or seem to imply agreement with cryonics, which the speaker does not want to prematurely grant. I don’t actually consider freezing to be too offensive as a colloquial term, it’s just technically inaccurate (when and where good cryoprotectant perfusion can be obtained) and contributes to ignorant dismissals. And “corpse” is accurate if the hypothesis that cryonics is a failure is correct—the trouble is that by accepting it you are (at least implicitly) implicitly embedding the hypothesis in your terminology, and hence mixing up map and territory.
A person who founded a stabilization organization in Europe has recently admitted to associations with a vampire group and a satanist group. Does this kind of thing harm cryonics publicly perceived credibility? Or does it draw useful attention to it?
I think what cemented my resolve on the topic was reading the rickross forum reactions. They were so over-the-top group-thinky and WRONG that I suddenly felt I had to start defending cryonics from these weirdos.
Banning Mark Plus from commenting and explicitly restricting the topic to “ways in which cryonics is a cult” was probably what really flipped my bozo bit on them. That was also probably around the time I read this.
Now that I know the context of their experience with scientology I’m a bit more sympathetic to how they could be honestly wrong. I mean, they are thinking crazy, but something real happened to put them in crazy mode.
How can cryonics become more credible in the eyes of more people?
How can cryonics become more attention-worthy?
Maybe it goes like this: For most people, death is considered to be final and unescapable. Cryonics is thought of closely related to death. Thus cryonics’ promise to bring people back from freezing is seen with a much higher level of scepticism than warranted.
Yes. Cultural memes around death seem to make cryonics seem unrealistic or even downright rebellious against cultural norms. Frequently I hear people say “If someone wants to freeze their corpse as their last wishes I support that right.” But they are already calling the patient a corpse and referring to the vitrification process as freezing. So it’s kind of a back-handed endorsement as far as cryonics rights go.
Maybe part of the problem is that alternate labels to “corpse” and “freezing” are too complex or seem to imply agreement with cryonics, which the speaker does not want to prematurely grant. I don’t actually consider freezing to be too offensive as a colloquial term, it’s just technically inaccurate (when and where good cryoprotectant perfusion can be obtained) and contributes to ignorant dismissals. And “corpse” is accurate if the hypothesis that cryonics is a failure is correct—the trouble is that by accepting it you are (at least implicitly) implicitly embedding the hypothesis in your terminology, and hence mixing up map and territory.
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.
Nice one :-)
A person who founded a stabilization organization in Europe has recently admitted to associations with a vampire group and a satanist group. Does this kind of thing harm cryonics publicly perceived credibility? Or does it draw useful attention to it?
I think Richie as a critic could be the best thing ever to happen to cryonics. I find his website mentally painful to read.
I think what cemented my resolve on the topic was reading the rickross forum reactions. They were so over-the-top group-thinky and WRONG that I suddenly felt I had to start defending cryonics from these weirdos.
Banning Mark Plus from commenting and explicitly restricting the topic to “ways in which cryonics is a cult” was probably what really flipped my bozo bit on them. That was also probably around the time I read this.
Now that I know the context of their experience with scientology I’m a bit more sympathetic to how they could be honestly wrong. I mean, they are thinking crazy, but something real happened to put them in crazy mode.
On imminst there has been some attention to human hibernation. This only loosely related to cryonics but seems to have a lot more mainstream interest.