Matthew Durham - 03 February 2012 01:15 PM

DanielMoore1991 - 02 February 2012 08:44 PM

Also if one is gambling with the goal of immortality then the law should not interfere if only to interfere by limiting the odds by assuring death. The law, if the gamble serves correct, is committing the act of murdering. For if one intends to use the present methods of preservation and gambles then hypothetically what influenced the gamble was the notion of general freezing and preservation. Thus the government, by making the act of preservation before death illegal is decreasing the odds of the gambler.

To slightly modify Pascal:

Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that immortality is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose merely a few short years of your life. Wager, then, without hesitation that immortality is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

i believe the applicability of this adaptation to pascal’s wager must be considered in the context of its implications on society. for, on the one hand, where you have cryogenics or cryopreservation, the individual is only asking that they themselves be allowed to expend their own resources on their own body.

on the other hand, where god is concerned, we must remember that those devoted to religions typically expect all morality and social behaviors and interactions, for every human being, to revolve around their particular world view; a view they consider to have “divine” origin.

therefore i think such an analogy as mr. durham labors to make is misleading at best.

I’ve been a cryonics advocate for a couple of years now so I am familiar with both the biological and philosophical aspects.

The human brain is a thinking mechanism, that derives its properties (personality, memories, etc.) from the information it contains. (Basically the connections of the dendrites.) These are expressed in human life by communication with/through the body around it, but this could still be theoretically replaced with a robotic body or virtual avatar without too much hardship. The question of whether someone can be reanimated from cryonics is thus mostly one of whether enough of that information remains in a cryopreserved individual (whether right after natural death during the grey area or in the pseudo-euthanasia that cryopreserving a living one would constitute) such that advanced future technology can repair or recreate them with the same important properties.

It only gets more complex from there. There is no one cryonics debate, but thousands of mini-debates that it inevitably uncovers and provokes. I advise taking your time to explore them instead of making up your mind from an initial gut impression.

For example, is being the genesis point for an “upload” or digital functionally identical persona the same as survival? I think there are some good philosophical reasons to think the answer is yes, if you follow timeless physics and quantum mechanics, since atoms aren’t really discrete objects anyway, and they get replaced in the body over time anyway.

But maybe that’s a moot point, perhaps the brain can be repaired directly using nanotechnology (not necessarily drexlerian nanobots but something very sophisticated on the nano level). Can nanotech ever be that good? If not, perhaps with added research we can make it to the point of a perfectly preserved brain (not the same as a perfectly preserved whole body, which is orders of magnitude harder, so not necessarily the point of thawing a whole mammal) which can be implanted into a healthy cloned body down the road.

At what exact point does it become more obviously humane than keeping someone alive on a breathing tube? Should medical insurance cover it, as a replacement for other more pointless measures perhaps? Would/should your doctor recommend for or against it? If against, why? Would it be more ethical to enter cryostasis during life (near the conclusion of a terminal illness) than is the case with assisted dying by taking lethal medications as is legal in Oregon?

How much money should we be pouring into cryonics research? How much is being put towards it now? What does this say about the survival drive of humans where old age is concerned? Are we in a state of “learned helplessness” or is there perhaps an instinctual preference in the majority of people to die of old age?

Does religion predispose people to hate the idea of cryonics? Why are most secular people against it (and other kinds of ultra-long life extension research) as well? What do people feel is at risk, and what is actually at risk?

I’m just scratching the surface here.

A.N. The real question is, will the Romney’s baptise the soul into Mormonism after the body is frozen?That is what I am really concerned about.

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2012/feb/24/claim-surfaces-mormons-baptized-anne-frank-after-d/

Destination Immortality - 05 February 2012 01:03 AM

i believe the applicability of this adaptation to pascal’s wager must be considered in the context of its implications on society. for, on the one hand, where you have cryogenics or cryopreservation, the individual is only asking that they themselves be allowed to expend their own resources on their own body.

on the other hand, where god is concerned, we must remember that those devoted to religions typically expect all morality and social behaviors and interactions, for every human being, to revolve around their particular world view; a view they consider to have “divine” origin.

therefore i think such an analogy as mr. durham labors to make is misleading at best.

Thanks for pointing that out. This is a commonplace comparison so it is worth exploring exactly what is wrong with it.

In addition to the external social consequences you mention, there is the fact that religion involves persuading yourself of particular facts with extra certainty that does not come from evidence, aka faith. It puts you in the position of actively fearing to question or look for disconfirmation, so what starts as a supposedly rational gamble turns into what seems to the wagerer to be a sure bet. Cryonics by contrast is just a thing you do, like heart surgery or hand-washing. Your level of faith in it working is not a factor in it working or not working, only participation is. In fact skepticism can help by causing you to make more strenuous arrangements, e.g. having a team on hand the moment they pronounce you instead of tolerating delays, or aggressively funding research into less toxic cryoprotectants.

Also there is a really good counterargument to Pascal’s Wager that does not apply to cryonics, which is that of the myriad of competing faiths. Since there are thousands of equally plausible faiths which claim you will go to hell if you do not accept them (and infinity of them in the abstract, if we are assuming they can be arbitrarily constructed), you are just as well off accepting none of them. However there aren’t an arbitrarily high number of ways to preserve your body for a plausible literal reanimation by future science.