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By Richard in Tech, Thoughts ⋅ November 21, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

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To some, the prospect of eternal life is an enticing fate, and many believe that they can achieve this with cryogenics, or cryonics to be accurate. I’ve always viewed cryonics with an intense pessimism, but I’ve become a lot more open towards it after reading several studies about the success that has been achieved in preserving the brain. However, it is still reliant on ‘future medicine’ to repair or replace the damage that your body has suffered in your ‘first life’. There are even efforts within the cryogenic community to make it more accessible to the common person, with cheaper plans available if you only want to freeze your head (Neuropreservation). This is especially appealing as ‘future science’ will undoubtably be able to provide you with a perfect new body. Perhaps this is a sensible idea though, it is much cheaper, and the process of freezing can irreparably damage much of the body.

Perhaps if my life was going to be cut short by dying young I could be enticed into spending large amounts of money trying to freeze myself, after all these people purely desire a full life, but it is the people who just want more that bother me. Disregarding any ethical issues (be it the soul, your identity, or whether this ‘future society’ will still care about you enough to reanimate you) it's just greed. Or maybe they are just afraid of death. You need to be legally dead to be frozen, so if ever cryonics is successful, then mankind will have discovered a ‘cure’ for death. That still does not mean eternal life though, and they will all have to face death someday.

Perhaps I am wrong. Maybe in 30 years, when I am getting older, Cryonics will evolve into a realistic way to extend your life. I still foresee problems. Unless Humankind spreads out a bit more, and I am equally pessimistic about the prospect of colonies on other planets (not for a long time at least) I can’t see any future society rushing to revive the hoards of people who want a second go at life.

The Cryonics institute, http://www.cryonics.org/reprise.html, seeks to answer many of the questions I have raised. Here are some extracts from their answer to the question “What happens to the soul of a cryonics patient?”

Many cryonicists do believe in a soul. If cryonics is simply an unproven medical procedure there is no more reason to believe that the soul goes away during cryopreservation than during a night's sleep.

Does this therefore mean that the soul does not leave the body when it dies? So, at what point does the soul leave the body? These patients have died. They are not sleeping.

Cryonics is not in conflict with religion any more than medicine is in conflict with religion.

Maybe from their point of view. To me, resurrection of the dead gives new meaning to ‘playing god’.

Cryonics patients are not regarded as dead by cryonicists.

So, even though they are legally dead…

How long can future medicine potentially extend human life? Perhaps by hundreds or thousands of years or more. Plans of an omniscient God would not likely be thwarted by human efforts to extend human life hundreds or thousands of years. Hundreds or thousands of years is not a significant amount of time in the context of eternity.

Am I the only person not tempted by the prospect of living for thousands of years? I can barely make it through Monday without wanting to end it all. Thousands of years? The final point that they make, however;

To refuse new life extension technologies could be a sin comparable to suicide.

Bullshit. Are they seriously inferring that not being cryogenically frozen is a sin? What narcissistic crap. I honestly cannot believe that they would say something like that, and it appals me.

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