X-Message-Number: 31546
References: <>
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:28:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: 2Arcturus <>
Subject: Re: speculative medical procedure & immortality

--0-476557393-1237822102=:11416

From: Kennita Watson <>
>>>Message #31535
From: "Kennita (Go Cryo!)" <>
Subject: Re: the immortalist Bible and cryonics
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 04:02:31 -0700
References: <>

>>>I think it's a bad idea to put cryonics in
the same bin with resurrection and immortality.
It seems disingenuous, because cryonicists
don't see themselves as dead in the same sense,
resurrection as the blissful reward in the same
sense, or immortality as necessarily eternal in
the same sense, that Christians generally mean.


Well, just to deal with "dead in the same sense" -- I know this is a subjective 
thing and depends on subjective definitions of "death", but I already see people
adjusting their notion of death to something that is reversible by medicine. 

There was a commercial on TV recently where a woman touting aspirin recounted 
how she "died" in the emergency room when she had a heart attack. Anecdotally, 
people seem to enjoy telling how they were "dead" for a minute or so and came 
back to life in the hospital.

People of course still have a sense in which there is a "final" death, but with 
advances in resuscitation, this will keep getting pushed back.

But my point is, I think people are able to get comfortable with the idea of 
death as something reversible, medically. And of course, almost every religion 
preaches that death is reversible by other means, too. So IMO the idea that 
death is reversible is not a problem.

>>>Best to play it straight, presenting cryonics
as a speculative medical procedure 

You probably lose a lot of people at "speculative medical procedure" :)

Especially doctors, who don't like anything they are involved in to be 
"speculative".
Medicine, like science, prefers to be based on verified procedures.

When experiments are done on human subjects, they are done under tightly 
controlled and regulated conditions. 

But cryopreservation cannot even be described as an experiment (what is the 
*treatment*?) -- it could at best be described as preparation for a *future* 
experiment (the experiment will be the resuscitation attempt).


I have done a lot of thinking on this subject, and I think cryonics loses as 
many people as it gains by invoking the "medicine" label (and the "science" 
label) -- because cryonics is patently neither, and that suggests to many people
the possibility of fraud and misrepresentation.

This is so even though cryonics uses current medicine and science to guide its 
practice, and looks forward to future medicine and science to complete the 
resuscitation.

The thing is, cryonics uses current medicine and science in ways that have no 
present-day application. And future medicine and science are not (now) medicine 
or science -- they are almost complete unknowns.

>>>hose desired
(*not* guaranteed!) end is to be resuscitated,
cured of whatever disease or trauma incapacitated
them, and rejuvenated, hopefully into a world
where rejuvenation and freedom from diseases,
including the disease(s) of aging, is commonplace.

Well, not just hopefully, in my opinion, but necessarily.

I would see no point in resuscitating anyone if there is still aging or common 
incurable disease or conditions or irreversible death of any kind. It would be 
cruel to resuscitate someone, only to see them continue to deal with the ravages
of aging and then die a second time!


So IMO here is the world that will resuscitate cryonics patients: a world in 
which there is no death, no aging, no disease, and no irreversible injury or 
medical conditions; a world in which the dead can be raised; a world that has 
the resources and compassion to raise the dead and reintegrate them into their 
society.


I suspect that such a world is barely recognizable to most people today as a 
world that can have continuity with the world of today. It is already beyond a 
kind of "singularity" of the imagination. Its denizens break the categories of 
the human and the human condition. The only discourse (language tradition) that 
normally deals with such possibilities is religion.


Now, I don't think cryonics itself is a religion. And I am absolutely disgusted 
by the idea of using religion as a "marketing" technique. 

But I think by avoiding the "spiritual" dimensions of cryonics, cryonicists are 
kind of ignoring the elephant in the drawing room or the 800-pound gorilla in 
the room or whatever the proper form of that figure of speech is :) 

Many people I talk to immediately grasp the profound and mind-boggling 
implications of cryonics, so to argue with them 'No, this is just a minor 
medical procedure, pay no attention to that!', I think in a way that is kind of 
disingenuous. I think in many ways it shows current cryonicist majority's 
discomfort with the "big picture issues" cryonics raises.

I think there is also a bit of denial about science and medicine - cryonics 
wants to be science's little sister, but science doesn't have any little 
sisters, and it is suspicious of mysterious waifs who come up to it claiming to 
be such :)

I don't think there is any ready category for what cryonics is. It is not 
medicine or science because it depends so much on faith in future unknowns. It 
is also not religion in the sense most people are familiar with, since it does 
not depend on the supernatural.

Maybe it has more in common with the kind of "everyday faith" that gets people 
through the day - neither science nor religion promises the sun will rise 
tomorrow. Yet every night before bed we set our alarms :)



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