Cryonics: Foresight or Fantasy

Great Debates
61

I was actually thinking of funds beyond those held by the organization set up as a charity to care for the corpsicle. As I recall, and I refuse to research this insanely complex area of law, a method was devised to allow for the funding of perpetual maintenance of grave sites which would be a similar problem. As for the long term viability of those particular organizations I wouldn’t take much from the fact that no one has drained it yet, this would be best run as a long term scam. They seem to only recently be taking the most rudimentary steps to properly structure their organization.

A corporation doesn’t really solve your problem for the other funds as someone still has to own the shares. Alcor suggests that there are jurisdictions without the rule against perpetuities but it is hard to believe that there aren’t other problems to contend with.

62

The concept is to be revived when those diseases can be cured and to salvage the brain and its memories and habits that make up the individual personality. Not much point to revive one, only to die again of same ailments. Hopefully, but not necessary to revive the identical physical body.

How about reviving same brain, different container. One’s physical identity is not the only part of a person. Adjusting to different body may be no more difficult to adjusting to lifestyles 50 to 200 years from now. Too threatening? Don’t sign up.

Would you want to wake up on another planet, knowing no one or anything about technology? Maybe like being dropped into third world country or jungle not knowing what the language or customs are or who can be trusted. No relatives or loved ones that you know now. Might even be lonely. No cell phones to call spouse.

How long would it take to adjust? After adjustment, however, one would be thankful they chose to come back and feel sorry for those that didn’t.

63

Ned: Hrm… ok. Apparently you can get around the Trust problem pretty easily (according to a message on the cryonics listserv archive). Lichtenstein(I hope I spelled that right) has nothing against perpetual trusts, so it would simply be a matter of setting up the trust there. Said trust might have to pay US taxes due to it being for a US citizen, but other than that it’s a fairly neat solution. It does have a weakness, though, in that it relies on Lichtenstein not changing that law. For cryonics, that would be a serious problem.

64

Well, you could always bury some items that would be collectible a couple of hundred years from now. A coin collection would be a good candidate.

The difference between the banana analogy and freezing is that we actually can posit a hypothetical, reasonable mechanism for being able to revive someone. It’s an engineering problem, not a problem of basic science.

And you don’t have to cough up the money in a big lump sum. Just take out an extra insurance policy, and bequeath the proceeds to Alcor or whoever. Now your huge investment turns out to be maybe $30/mo. Hell, lots of people spend more than that on their stamp collections, so if this gives you peace of mind and a ‘hobby’ in following advances in the field and such, where’s the harm?

Hell, lots of people spend more than that drinking alcohol each month. Are you going to judge them too? How about the people who spend hundreds of dollars a month on a sports car when they could drive an old beater for a fraction of that?

Why must we always judge everyone else?

Now, if Alcor or other freezing companies were pure scams, that’s another matter, and I’d be fighting against them too. But from what I can tell, they are honest companies doing exactly what they advertise, and doing it with great care and respect. And they don’t misrepresent what they offer, either. They’ll tell you that we might never be able to revive these people, and they admit that future procedures will be much more likely to work than what they can achieve today. So it’s all on the up-and-up, all the cards are on the table, and people are free to make rational choices. I can’t understand how you could possibly object to that.

As for giving your money away to a foundation or something, isn’t that exactly what you’re doing? Even if you believe that the current freezing process is horribly flawed, the money you pay to be frozen is helping to fund research that may make it more likely to work in the future. That sounds like a pretty good cause to spend your money on, if you ask me.

But then, couldn’t we make the same argument to anyone who spends any money on frivolous things? Shouldn’t we put all our disposable cash into bank accounts so that we can leave it to worthy causes when we die? If you don’t think so, then you’re a hypocrite for objecting to people spending money to have themselves frozen.

65

Nice post, Sam.

66

You guys are right about the breakdown of the banana analogy; it was just that, reading the material at cryonics.org, It was repeatedly my impression that what I was reading was saying “we have no idea if this can work, but we want you to think it’s a dead cert”.