Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

[djm4]

I also don't think I'd want to wake up in a world which was run by people who had actually made this work. I suspect they'd be the worst sort of leeches; people who would think 'it's better to spend resources unfreezing this one dead rich person than to feed these twenty living children.'

Of course, it's possible that in the future we'd have enough resources that that choice wouldn't need making (it would need to be a lot of resources, given how we apportion out the ones we have today). But I very strongly doubt it, and I can certainly live with the possibility of being wrong. The idea of being dead doesn't bother me much, although I admit that some of the ways I might transition to that state are deeply unpleasant.

[barakta]

Yes I had that thought about waking up and knowing that to bring me back to life resources which could go to more others aren't being made available to them, it's bad enough as it is now.

Have you ever read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson? One of the premises of that book is that life can be extended several so that some of the original starting people live to well over 200 - which on Mars is presumed to be sustainable but when Earthers find out about it there's huge outrage and demand for it on an already overcrowded planet. The trilogy has a lot of faults, but that's one of the better 'ideas' explored (not enough) I feel.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That's the world we live in today; we spend tens of thousands of pounds keeping cancer patients alive, when the same money would save twenty lives in the Third World. I'm hoping the future will do better on that axis, just as I think we do better today than we did in the past.

[djm4]

That's the world we live in today; we spend tens of thousands of pounds keeping cancer patients alive, when the same money would save twenty lives in the Third World.

We live in a world where we do that, yes.

If you want to debate the exact morality of the amount we spend on cancer care, I might be up for that, but it's a tricky subject that affects both friends and family, and so is hard to do objectively. However, I do see a qualitative difference between keeping someone alive using technology that is currently known to work, and storing someone who's long-term dead using technology that might very well not work at all. So I don't accept that the world I described in my reply is the world we live in today, even if it shares some features.

We also live in a country - though sadly not a world - where evidence-based cost/benefit analysis is seen as important in determining which treatments to make generally available to people who otherwise couldn't afford them on the NHS. I think this is a good thing, and makes the world a bit less like the one I described in my reply.

(Again, speaking personally, when I get cancer, I want the miniumum spent on me to let me die in bearable pain. I have no problem at all with the many people - including my parents and a couple of good friends - who make other choices, but that is mine.)

I'm hoping the future will do better on that axis, just as I think we do better today than we did in the past.

We may do better in the future, but I think one of the signs of us doing better is that we'll regard the idea of cryonics with a sort of amused horror. I'm also not convinced that we will continue to make progress in this area if resources become scarce, as I expect they will unless we manage to, say, crack sustainable nuclear fusion, but that's a rant I've had before, and I know you're more optimistic than I am on that subject (I also hope you're right).

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I can believe in a lot of more pessimistic scenarios, but I doubt we'd be rescusitated in them.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

"We may do better in the future, but I think one of the signs of us doing better is that we'll regard the idea of cryonics with a sort of amused horror."

Another scenario might be that we do get better as a people and we wake up in a world where everyone looks at us with horror knowing the amount of money we spent to save our own lives in an age where that money could have saved at least twenty times that many people.

Even failing that, we might generally find ourselves out of touch with a new culture and it's morals. One of the advantages of dying in your own time is you get the benefit of being judged relative to your time and culture even when you fall woefully short of modern standards.

If we could resurrect the dead rich from a few hundred years ago, would they find a warm welcome or would they not find modern society to their liking?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Also, of course, practically everybody already does regard the idea of cryonics with amused horror.