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only if you abuse the abstraction of language to impose restrictions on reality that don't exist. people who would have been declared dead 50 years ago are now
by nazgulnarsil 16y ago
only if you abuse the abstraction of language to impose restrictions on reality that don't exist. people who would have been declared dead 50 years ago are now resuscitated routinely.
- tptacek 16y agoWhat does that have to do with his point? The resuscitations you're talking about are not part of a continuum of improving outcomes for people with massive total systemic cellular damage from freeze-thaw cycles.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agoyou're discussing damage that comes about from primitive forms of cryonic preservation that haven't been used in decades. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197
- tptacek 16y agoFreeze-thaw cycles in LN2 also damage cells.
- philwelch 16y agoI don't think anyone who's ever been declared "dead" has ever been "resuscitated" more than a year after the fact, at least not since we've been able to distinguish a comatose state from death. Fine, there's a slim chance it's theoretically possible. I openly conceded that. Multiply that by all the other slim chances involved, though, and it gets even slimmer. It doesn't balance against the extreme costs unless your decision-making process is extraordinarily selfish.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agoI choose not to pretend my decisions aren't selfish.
- philwelch 16y agoEven from a selfish perspective, cryonics is basically the science fiction version of Pascal's Wager.