More Death

By the way, in the post I derided yesterday, in which Michael Anissimov congratulated two corpses for their good sense in being disposed of in a way he approves of, he also stated: "In a material, non-mystical world where the mind is what the brain does, preserving the structure of the brain is a foremost concern if you care about continuing to exist."

I want to point out that this formulation of Anissimov's is a quintessentially futurological piece of shady business.

Whether frozen or vitrified the brain is scarcely "preserved" by the process but profoundly transformed, be it mulched, sheared, toxified, and who knows what else.

We do not know remotely enough to declare that "selfhood" retrievably continues to exist in the aftermath of these processes.

It hardly requires supernaturalism or mysticism -- Anissimov's insinuations to the contrary notwithstanding -- to testify to the strongest skepticism about whether memories or dispositions materialized, say, in quantum effects or electrochemical dynamisms or who knows what else in the brain would be "preserved" by freezing or vitrification, or about whether neural complexes dispersed throughout the body but typically dispensed with in techno-immortalizing accounts of selves as minds as brains as calculators non-negligibly incarnate emotional or other actually indispensable dimensions of selfhood, or what have you.

Robot Cultists like to pretend that they are consummately scientific and that those who deride them are anti-scientific to do so, but of course there are few consensus scientists who affirm the Robot Cultists' truly flabbergastingly fantastic extrapolations and sloppy sleights of hand.

I am not a scientist, certainly, but I am technoscientifically literate enough to know that I am not and to defer to the consensus of those who are on matters like these, matters in which other non-scientists are selling techno-transcendentalizing faith-based initiatives. It should be easy to see how crusty atheistical folks like me are far from indulging in supernaturalism in our skepticism of the Robot Cultists.

By the way, as I said before, I am not a scientist but I am a rhetorician by training, temperament, and trade, and I am here to tell you that I am the one -- not proper scientists -- who is often in the best position to describe what is really afoot argumentatively and figuratively in the formulations of wish-fulfillment fantasists and bullshit artists of the Robot Cult archipelago.

The leap from the denial that the self is an immaterial soul to the affirmation that a brain wrapped in foil like a potato and frozen will preserve that self for the nanobots of the future is actually a larger leap than science can bear, but is a familiar enough bit of business for the rhetorician's scalpel -- just as is the leap from the denial that intelligence is supernatural to the affirmation that non-biological but still legible AI is necessarily possible -- just as is the leap from the recognition that molecules function in nature to the claim that robust artifical programmable self-replicating room-temperature nanomachines will deliver abundance -- and so on.

Superlative futurology is just conventional futurological advertising-hype discourse but in such an extreme form that it has taken on the coloration of outright organized religiosity. There's certainly little that is scientific about it at all.

To this, Anissimov replied in the Moot:

Dale, I congratulated them for making what I think can be a difficult choice. It is my way of showing my respect for their decision.

Now let me be clear: To the extent that a cryonics firm claims with the remotest confidence to have accomplished with a dewar more than what a cemetery accomplishes with a mausoleum in the way of personal immortalization, it's a scam in my view. It is possible that Anissimov himself is in on it, and/or bamboozled himself.

I "respect," I suppose, those who choose to dispose of their corpses via vitrification, cremation, burial, and so on more or less equally indifferently. Just don't expect me -- in the form of a demand for "respect" -- to abet the preposterous insinuation that there is anything particularly scientific about such faith-based initiatives.

For myself, I rather like the idea of being dropped into a hole more or less as is with a nice pear tree planted on top, but I can't say it matters to me much, nor that I expect others to enthuse over that inclination of mine.

Everybody dies, you know, and so, most certainly, will everybody reading these words, including those of you who indulge in denialism via the various sects of the Robot Cult.

I can respect the cryonaut's different taste in the matter of the aesthetics of corpse disposal, without sharing it myself, but I don't allow him different facts than the ones actually on offer in the matter of human mortality.