io9 has covered the Kim Suozzi cryonics story. I found especially interesting a comment there bemoaning, "a shocking amount of negativity in these comments." In this formulation, "negativity" is identified with skepticism and "positivity" with credulity. You know, Science!
Chiming in on this sentiment, another Robot Cultist cries out: "People are so damn attached to dying, it just makes me sick. Cryonics really needs better PR. There's so much misinformation floating around." That last line is especially rich. Actually all three lines in a row are pretty rich in their own separate awful ways.
The original comment continues: "As science and medicine advance it seems inevitable that we will eventually conquer disease, aging and even death." It's interesting that literally all the evidence in the world and in all of history always only absolutely attests to the fact that every person will inevitably die, and yet for this True Believer what seems "inevitable" instead is something that has never happened, ever, and which no one can feasibly describe happening. C.S. Lewis insisted that the technological imaginary is continuous with the magickal imaginary, and in moments in which "technology" is simply assumed, as a matter of the unfolding of "its" own inner logic, to render inevitable what is now impossible that continuity is exposed quite acutely.
At the end of the comment, its author declares that "If people want to donate their money to a more 'worthy' cause, please do so. For me, trying to save this girls life is as worthy as it gets." Just to be clear, the worthy causes to which the author refers here are suggestions elsewhere in the comments that money might be more usefully directed to medical research addressing the actual condition from which Kim Suozzi is suffering and dying. For the Robot Cultist in question, it is so ironic to call such efforts worthy that they put the word in scare quotes. Nice.
But more to the point, you will notice that by hiding behind the suffering sentimentalized body of Kim Suozzi the commenter seeks to present as an unchallengeable assertion that cryonics is a matter of "sav[ing] this girl's life" when of course all that is certain is that cryonics -- like burial, like cremation, like getting shot into orbit post-mortem, like getting compressed into a diamond on a ring for a spouse to remember you by, like getting mummified and interred in the immortality-engine of an Egyptian pyramid -- is a corpse disposal method. That it could be more than that is precisely what is under discussion and looks to be in the gravest doubt to anybody who notices how hypothetical most of the enterprise is and how freighted with objections are the few aspects of the enterprise that aren't hypothetical. But never mind, look, a dying girl, a roseate dream of techno-heaven, and a line of footprints in the sand!
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7 comments:
> "As science and medicine advance it seems inevitable that
> we will eventually conquer disease, aging and even death." It's
> interesting that literally all the evidence in the world and
> in all of history always only absolutely attests to the fact
> that every person will inevitably die, and yet for this
> True Believer what seems "inevitable" instead is something
> that has never happened, ever, and which no one can feasibly
> describe happening. C.S. Lewis insisted that the technological
> imaginary is continuous with the magickal imaginary. . .
Speaking of C. S. Lewis:
"I find it difficult to keep from laughing when I find people
worrying about future destruction of some kind or other. Didn’t
they know they were going to die anyway? Apparently not. My wife
once asked a young woman friend whether she had ever thought
of death, and she replied, ‘By the time I reach that age science
will have done something about it!’”
-- http://www.cbn.com/special/Narnia/articles/ans_LewisLastInterviewB.aspx
That conversation would have taken place circa 1960 or so,
and I fear that "young woman friend" is no longer young, if
indeed she's still alive at all.
And no, I'm not gloating about it. I can remember very distinctly,
in the bathroom one Saturday morning when I was 11 or so,
after having spent a good deal of time mooning over the "Chart of the Future"
in Arthur C. Clarke's _Profiles of the Future_,
( http://www.scribd.com/doc/58259024/16/Chart-of-the-Future )
in which he placed "Immortality" at ca. 2100, wondering
what the chances might be of my own life being "stretched"
long enough to reach the year 2100 (I'd be about 150 if I lasted that
long ;-> ). "Live long enough to live forever!" as
Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman say. Yes, I was 11 and I
was already worried about dying, and lusting over the
possibility that I might not have to. That Saturday would have
been just a few years after Lewis's wife's conversation with
her young woman friend; nevertheless, by the time I was
reading Clarke, Lewis's wife was dead and Lewis himself would
soon be dead. (Lewis died the same day Kennedy was shot, a fact
which few people seem to remember.) BTW, every salient person in
my life from those days is now dead as well.
Dale -- you realize of course that in mentioning C. S. Lewis
at all (or J. R. R. Tolkien, for that matter, I suppose),
one risks some people nodding their heads and saying "Of
course, **that's** why they're luddites! Their crypto-
God-botherers after all, despite their protestations
of atheism. ;-> "
Well, Lewis **has** been called the "apostle to the skeptics",
and I find him eminently readable (most of the time).
He was also a very very smart man (though I can see
exactly where he was glossing over the logical flaws in
his own arguments).
_That Hideous Strength_ should be required reading for
all >Hists, though I fear few of them would have the
stomach for it. I absolutely **hated** it when I first
tried to read it (even after having gotten through
_Out of the Silent Planet_ and _Perelandra_).
Nowadays I find it hilarious.
I teach CS Lewis' "Abolition of Man" quite a lot to undergraduates, usually twice a year or so -- and though there is lots of beautiful writing in it and lots of fine disparate insights my overall take on the piece is finally quite negative, as my many students could attest, interestingly enough.
"Cryonics really needs better PR. There's so much misinformation floating around"
From a professional perspective, I couldn't agree more.
I looked over a bunch of the cryonics sites over the weekend and they are filled with what copywriters call "weasel words".
These terms are almost always used when there is no clear benefit to the consumer or the vendor is trying to conceal something. It's not a good look, no matter what you're selling.
If cryoenthusiasts are really concerned with misinformation, they could start with clarifying things on their own sites.
Another area of opportunity for them is offering a much better explanation of what happens between the time you flatline and the time the cryo company picks you up.
Anyone who has spent anytime in a working hospital would understand how laughable the description of the hospital's duties are. In an environment where life and death emergencies are happening all around, do you really expect a hospital staff to administer any special care to a body?
If I may, here is a new headline offered freely to any cryo businesses out there (with apologies to The Big Lebowski):
"It's our least modest receptacle"
> I looked over a bunch of the cryonics sites over the weekend
> and they are filled with what copywriters call "weasel words".
I suspect that the only comprehensive and honest information
you'll find is on Mike Darwin's Chronosphere site.
And he's not currently selling anything.
> Another area of opportunity for them is offering a much better
> explanation of what happens between the time you flatline and
> the time the cryo company picks you up.
That's hardly an area of "opportunity" for them, because that's
where the ball gets dropped, usually. The ideal is for that time
to be reduced to zero.
Anything else, and the brain undergoes "ischemia". What that means
in the case of cryonics (from what I understand reading Mike Darwin's
explanation) is that it is impossible, after ischemia (blockage of
blood vessels, presumably) has occurred, to saturate brain tissue with
cryoprotectant (antifreeze, basically). Without that, deep freezing, instead
of "vitrifying" the brain, reduces the brain tissue to mush.
> Anyone who has spent anytime in a working hospital would understand
> how laughable the description of the hospital's duties are. In an
> environment where life and death emergencies are happening all around,
> do you really expect a hospital staff to administer any special care to
> a body?
I think the best they can hope for is for hospitals to be required
(under threat of legal liability) to provide the space for the
cryonics folks to come in and do their job. I don't think there's
much likelihood of being able to require the **hospital** to perform
the initial steps of that process (whatever those step might ideally be).
Sorry for the bit of off topic post but I was just reading through the Nextbigfture blog when I stumbles upon this.
"George Church is a giant in gene sequencing, synthetic biology and DNA science. In the October, 2012 Discover Magazine, George Church teases with some ideas he has for achieving physical immortality (indeterminant lifespans) via Synthetic biology."
< http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/09/george-church-outlines-pathway-to.html >
Reading through the comments on it it's seems some of NBF's resident live forever and TH types have noow jumped o this as a new hooby horse.
Kurt9, (a guy I have talked to before) just straight up say's that this is the follow up the De Grey's SENS project in life extension.....he makes it sound like SENS has already achieved anything?
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