X-Message-Number: 1556
Subject: CRYONICS: Re: Risk of Unlimited Suffering
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 93 09:28:30 EST
From: 

Several comments in response to Eastmond's concerns about technological
Hell:

1. I wish that people who believed in the conventional Christian
Heaven and Hell would have the same concerns as you and seriously
consider avoiding death because they might wind up in Hell.  I presume
you don't believe in an afterlife, because then you'd be faced with
the same dilemma whether you die or you have youself frozen and revived.
(Just so you know where I'm coming from: My working hypothesis is that
there is no afterlife, but I can imagine worlds that look like this
one that do have an afterlife.  Worlds with an afterlife generally
require the presence of a God who wants to play games with us.)

2. I suspect that manipulating the pleasure centers of the brain would
be much easier than reviving a person frozen with today's techniques.
If you had this little knob that you could set at "bliss" or "pain",
then pursuing bliss would be a trivial and meaningless activity.  In
fact, since the little knob is in principle buildable, pursuing bliss
is an aim in life that you'll have to abandon eventually.  You'll
eventually need another way to make decisions, and you might as well
start looking for the other way now.  Whether you are in Hell may be
an irrelevant distraction.

3.
>But it seems to me that the possibility always remains that some
>nightmare scenario can occur, whereby patients are reanimated but are
>kept in a situation where they suffer indefinitely, without even the
>freedom to ask for euthanasia.

Sounds like a modern nursing home, to me.  I have this great
grandmother whose brain has rotted (Parkinson's disease, and maybe
Alzheimer's too) who just lays there...

4. 
>Are these reasonable points ...

Yes.  Ultimately the only way I know how to deal with them is the same
way I deal with the possibility of crashing my car each time I drive,
or the possibility that terrorists will take over the building I'm in
and start torturing the occupants.  Either you take the risk, or you
take some other risk.  There is no path that has no risk.  You must
decide what to do on the basis of insufficient information, and then
you suffer if you decide wrong.  Life is tough.

Tim Freeman <>    CompuServe ID 71045,2267 checked occasionally.
When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun.
Now they've come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all.

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