See, there’s your problem; we’re not talking about any specific preachers. Do I believe non-specific preachers right, in general? Of course not. How could I?
It’s not a case of compelling evidence, it’s a case of mismatched comparisons; cryonics makes material claims that can be materially examined; preachers make claims that include reference to supernatural entities. Now of course I understand that this does not validate their claims, but my point is that it allows for a greater possibility that the claims are made in innocent earnest. That is all.
I was going to repeat my request that you take this up in a relevant thread of your own, but you might as well carry on here now that this one is wrecked.
Different standards of proof can be compared. The standard of proof in cryonics may be poor science. The standard of proof in religion is complete bullshit, or as it is more euphamistically known, faith.
They maybe should know better, and probably some do, but hope springs eternal.
These guys should definitely know better, but I’ll admit that the vast vast vast majority are (how did Mangetout put it?) deluded to the point of true insanity. Lets not forget that they are taking in dwarfs that of the cryonics folks.
Also Menocchio, you made some definitive statements about the soul, and I asked you for a cite.
I actually know some of the folks who run Alcor. They’re all signed up to be a head in a jar themselves. They truly believe in what they are doing, so in that sense it’s not a con job. Of course, the science itself is a pretty rickety tower built on loose sand, but OTOH, ther’s much worse places to spend your life insurance pay outs too.
Quit playing. You and I both know were talking about Christianity, and you have proclaimed that you are at least nominally Christian. Christian preachers are pretty universal about some sort of afterlife scenario. If your beliefs differ markedly from this say so, otherwise don’t be so shy.
That future people will someday have the technology to defrost your corpsicles, is not something that can be definitively answered or materially examined today. That leaves room for hope (if only a sliver) and that leaves more than enough room for innocent earnest and/or delusion. Remember Bacon, “For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes.”
I was the second, not the first, on to notice the religious connection.
And, of course, the science is continually improving. It’s always fun to see what new stuff the Alcor folks have come up with to improve their storage methods.
Well … I thought that the main activity of a neuron was to fire or not, and that receptors and ligands just alter the probability that the cell will fire.
If that’s the case, then it’s possible that there indeed might not be much need for cellular integrity. We’ve already built electronic “neurons” that work like biological neurons, and biological neurons seem to treat them just like biological neurons when placed in a network with them.
Of course, there are plenty of theories about what creates consciousness, but I don’t understand why psychoactive drugs would be evidence for anything except the fact that consciousness can be affected by chemicals.
A side question: if cryonics as practiced today doesn’t do a very good job of preserving a body/ brain in as intact a condition as possible, then what would? Having your head removed by guillotine immediately after the pronouncement of death and plunged into a vat of liquid nitrogen?
Electricity can’t be frozen. The brain works (as far as we know) on electricity, synapses and such. In any event it would probably (I guess) take ten to twenty thousand years for such a technology to develop. I don’t think any business can survive that long.
Makes no difference; my argument was not that religion in any form is more or less correct or worthy than cryonics, or that the ‘afterlife’ offered by cryonics was better, worse, similar to, different from, more or less likely or more or less of a con than that promised by any religion. Do you understand that? I am not defending any religion here.
My argument (in connection with religion) was solely this: that the claims and evidences offered by cryonics and religion are different in such a way that I believe it is more likely (and therefore more understandable when we encounter it) that a minister of religion happens to be an earnest believer in his doctrines, than a member of staff at a cryonics company happens to earnestly believe that he/she is preserving bodies in a fit state to someday be revived.
That’s the entirety of my argument against your comparison of religion and cryonics; for the purposes of this discussion, I am prepared to allow as given that all religions are utterly and completely false and without merit. This doesn’t change the way they work as regards their ministers and followers being convinced of them.
In the light of this data, I guess I will have to revise my position; my impression (from the (edited excerpts of) interviews with selected Alcor senior management on the TV documentary) was that *here are a bunch of folks who know they are pulling a fast one. But your personal experience of them trumps that.
A) I’m completely lost as to what you mean about electricty being frozen. The electrical impulses that neurons generate are powered by, IIRC, ions moving in and out of the cell. If you freeze the chemicals, and then thaw them out in such a way that the cell still works (that’s the hard part), there’s no need to freeze the electricity per se.
B) There’s no means of saying how long it would take to develop such a technology, and 10,000-20,000 years is obviously just a wild guess. Kurzweil et al. believe that we’ll have nanotech and AI by the year 2030, and that we’ll experience about 20,000 years of technological progress at today’s rates during the next century. So you can see why cryonics would be attractive to somebody who believes them. (Whether they’re correct, of course, is another question entirely, as is whether we’ll survive the century at all.)
Well, it’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but essentially yes; Alcor states uniquivocally that the sooner they can get to your body and infuse the cryoprotectants and get it cooled down to storage temperatures, the better state everything is in.
It’s not just a matter of preventing the decay of your brain’s neurons and glia and the like, but also preventing the clotting of blood and decay of the blood vessels that they need access to in order to properly perfuse the brain with their cryoprotectants and whatnot. They point out that the longer you wait, the more your brain decays and the harder it is for them to get the cryoprotectant into your brain and whatnot.
That’s why, if I were a serious cryonics believer who could qualify for a life insurance policy or had $20,000 to spare, I’d go to Alcor’s facility if I were near death, and have them start immediately after my heart stopped. Obviously you have no control over sudden death, but if you’re going to do that, I don’t see why a seriously ill, near-death cryonics believer (like the woman in the documentary referred to in the OP – and by the way, where can I get ahold of a copy of that, Mangetout? It sounds interesting) would just wait around to die several thousand miles from Alcor.
Better, but I think probably still not good enough; even if you were in a hospital or care facility local to Alcor’s lab, there is still a delay waiting for you to be pronounced dead and for your body to be released (I expect sufficient lubrication with cash might be able to speed up the wheels of that particular mechanism though), and for whole-body preservation, it is a process that still takes many hours on the table in the Alcor lab, so head-only preservation (provided that they decapitate right at the start of the process, so as not to waste time infusing the body, which I assume would be the case) Is probably going to result in much faster processing and greater integrity in the preserved tissues.
But still, the process itself just came across in the documentary as quite destructive of tissues - not just because of the time delay and the freezing process, but the infusion of cryopreservants made the corpse look like one of Gunther Von Hagens’ plastinations (linky).
I agree; what I meant was that if I were terminally ill and a cryonics patient, I’d go to Alcor’s lab to wait to die, so they could start the process as soon as my heart stopped. If they don’t provide that service, they really should.
Yeah, clearly the process does cause large amounts of damage. One thing that the online cryobiology reference work that Alcor links to mentions is that it would be a good idea to bring a few animals with each person, to try the restoration process out on first; that way, you’d know how well your restoration techniques worked on a brain that had been suspended using the same process used for that particular individual. Seems like a good idea to me.
Many thanks for the information about the documentary and the link to Alcor’s board. I’ll go read it.
POssibly a little of both, but mostly because you’re not legally dead until you are declared legally dead by a competent and qualified medical examiner (or at least that’s my understanding). I suppose Alcor could try to get someone on staff who could do this so that they could start the process at the earliest possible moment, but I think they might be reluctant to do it because of the possible repercussions arising from accusations of impartiality and the like.
Reading some of the linked material from that message board, there appears to be an ongoing dispute regarding accusations that someone, the possibility not excluding a member of Alcor staff, administered a lethal dose of barbiturates so as to essentially schedule the death of a client.
Now I should mention at this point that I don’t actually have a problem even with the idea of people in their right mind being able to turn up at the Alcor lab and saying "Please kill and freeze me’, but I’m sure the law, as it currently stands, would take an exceptionally dim view of the practice, or anything that might substantially resemble it - and for this reason, I think Alcor would probably not try to push the legal boundary too eagerly.
I was under the impression that any doctor can declare you dead.
Agreed. I don’t have a problem with it either, but I think they’d be exquisitely stupid to do anything like that in the current legal climate, as it could result in them being shut down and all of their patients thawed and cremated or buried. Ouch.
You may be right; I’m honestly not sure. Alcor does have a couple of doctors on staff - although according to the documentary, the majority of the preservation technicians have no formal medical qualification - and they don’t need it, since they are not dealing with live patients.
But I think they would still probably be playing it too close to the line if the Alcor docs declared you dead, then began immediately with the preservation.