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> It's stunning how many people extrapolate their own completely emotional, subjective reactions to certain things that do them no harm into wanting to destroy

> It's stunning how many people extrapolate their own completely emotional, subjective reactions to certain things that do them no harm into wanting to destroy or stop them. I don't get the ignorance/hostility that people seem to have towards cryopreservation, or things like longevity research that even in the short term could have tangible benefits for letting people at least live out their later days without feeling like their bodies are breaking down and decaying, a more respectful sunset to one's life. But at the same time, I never got how people can be okay with the concept of dying - to me and some other people, that's the single most scary thing out there. With most research telling us that essentially after death the mind just... ceases. No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever. I'm not okay with that and claims about "living on" in people's memories, or leaving a legacy - that wouldn't do me much good. It's likely that cryonics is just storing corpses that will never be revived due to our current methods being too primitive. But a 1% chance or even a 0.01% chance of fighting off entropy for a while longer seems worth it, versus guaranteed doom. Aside from that, it would be interesting to see how people would act if they had lifespans of a thousand years - knowing that what you'll do to the environment, you'll have to bear the burden of yourself.

HPsquared 3y ago
The mind ceases in deep sleep as well. Neurons aren't firing or communicating, just turning on and off in continual waves. EDIT: on reading a bit more, that may be an oversimplification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep
pclmulqdq 3y ago
I think the way you are thinking of death is sadly too common, but also profoundly materialistic and selfish. Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death. It doesn't say much of anything about your consciousness at all - in fact, it is still largely mystified as to why you aren't just a flesh robot following straightforward evolutionary imperatives with maybe a little quantum randomness thrown in. What you think about your conscious mind largely comes down to belief, and it looks like you believe that there is nothing more than the flesh robot, which I guess has some emergent properties that result in a conscious mind. If there really is nothing to it but what we have observed, then that's true, but there are a lot of things in the universe that we haven't observed, and this may be one of them. For all we know, any one of the religions could be right about life after death or the existence of some sort of "soul," including yours, which denies the existence of one. As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Why is life about what will "do me much good"? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out? There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well. Usually, they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead? Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it. I think it's a lot better to embrace the fact that you get about 100 years on this rock to advance the state of the world as much as you can before passing the job of being its steward onto the next generation.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  >As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out? If anything is selfish, it's making all sorts of unfounded assumptions about why people choose to try extending their lifespan and then moralizing based on those assumptions. People may have all kinds of reasons for wanting to try this, and they need not be materialistic or accumulation-based at all. Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants. By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise. Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms? >There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well. It isn't just a slice of the elite that would love to have extra years of life in the face of a total unknown darkness. It's something that many people would love, and if a few with more resources are willing to pay more (and again, the prices of these services aren't absurdly expensive) to hopefully move forward a technology that gives that to both rich and poor at some point, it's fundamentally a good thing, and certainly not something that should be hammered down because of very shaky and subjective moralizing. Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available. >they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead? Let's separate completely absurd assumptions about people needing cult beliefs to be open minded on weird science from the much more straightforward and reasoned logic of wanting to live a longer life, or experimenting with interesting new technologies. Here you're just smearing for its own sake. Also, cryogenics, for all its still tenuous science, is a far cry from purely mystical beliefs like medieval alchemy. By fixating on how absurd freezing seems to you only because current medicine can't reverse it yet without damage (though nothing material makes the idea impossible), you're scoffing at the idea in the same way as a priest from the 16th century probably would if you explained completely workable modern gene therapies and organ transplants to them.
mckravchyk 3y ago
> Aside from that, it would be interesting to see how people would act if they had lifespans of a thousand years - knowing that what you'll do to the environment, you'll have to bear the burden of yourself. How people would act? The masses would never change their way of thinking, meaning there would be no progress / change of culture as well as the danger of a bad culture persisting for millenias. At the same time you would see those in power conentrate even more power and it would be certainy power like you see in non-democratic countries, where one individual rules everyone, except that individual would never ever die. Imagine if Stalin has lived to this day. Now considering that, you would think that a 1984-like goverment with a supreme leader that lives for centuries would let the average person live forever in the first place? > versus guaranteed doom I would not call the death, complete absence of everything, following a life well lived, doom. Everything has an end. Of course if that happens too soon, that's a tragedy. > No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever. It's interesting to look at the opposite. If following death, there's no experience, no awareness, nothing. Then what is the now? what it means to be alive right now, to perceive and how is it different from the memories of the past and ideas of the future? It may sound far off, but in a way, we die every moment. And on a larger scale, the 8 y/o me, the 16 y/o me is no more, not in just terms of being made of different atoms, but in terms of identity. So you can also imagine that if a person lives thousands of years, they either experience many "deaths" over time or they live the same dull life for thousands of years - in which there was no point to live that long in the first place. I can share that fear though, but it would be more in the context of "you have x months / years" to live heard at a relatively young age with life feeling far from finished, but the longer I live and the more things I do and experience that I wanted to do and experience, I imagine the easier it is to come to terms and be grateful for what has happened already. Don't have anything against what they are doing and heck, if I could easily afford it, maybe I would even sign up - one way ticket to see what the future would be like (vs. nothing like you said). But I don't think it's that important and if humanity reverse engineers the brain so that a person can live for thousands of year, or potentially infenitely (I think that would be the biggest challenge that goes far beyond just stopping death, I would not expect a brain to work for hundreds of years without serious modifications), if everyone has an access to it, it's like one of those things like an omni-intelligent AI, something you would think everyone would be better off if it was never developed. I think it would be cool if aging was stopped (the prime years of adulthood are so short) but I'd wish there was some natural cap of say, 200 years max were the brain would just break down at the end and it would be very hard to make it work longer).

HPsquared 3y ago

The mind ceases in deep sleep as well. Neurons aren't firing or communicating, just turning on and off in continual waves. EDIT: on reading a bit more, that may be an oversimplification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep

pclmulqdq 3y ago

I think the way you are thinking of death is sadly too common, but also profoundly materialistic and selfish. Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death. It doesn't say much of anything about your consciousness at all - in fact, it is still largely mystified as to why you aren't just a flesh robot following straightforward evolutionary imperatives with maybe a little quantum randomness thrown in. What you think about your conscious mind largely comes down to belief, and it looks like you believe that there is nothing more than the flesh robot, which I guess has some emergent properties that result in a conscious mind. If there really is nothing to it but what we have observed, then that's true, but there are a lot of things in the universe that we haven't observed, and this may be one of them. For all we know, any one of the religions could be right about life after death or the existence of some sort of "soul," including yours, which denies the existence of one. As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Why is life about what will "do me much good"? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out? There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well. Usually, they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead? Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it. I think it's a lot better to embrace the fact that you get about 100 years on this rock to advance the state of the world as much as you can before passing the job of being its steward onto the next generation.

southernplaces7 3y ago
>As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out? If anything is selfish, it's making all sorts of unfounded assumptions about why people choose to try extending their lifespan and then moralizing based on those assumptions. People may have all kinds of reasons for wanting to try this, and they need not be materialistic or accumulation-based at all. Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants. By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise. Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms? >There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well. It isn't just a slice of the elite that would love to have extra years of life in the face of a total unknown darkness. It's something that many people would love, and if a few with more resources are willing to pay more (and again, the prices of these services aren't absurdly expensive) to hopefully move forward a technology that gives that to both rich and poor at some point, it's fundamentally a good thing, and certainly not something that should be hammered down because of very shaky and subjective moralizing. Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available. >they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead? Let's separate completely absurd assumptions about people needing cult beliefs to be open minded on weird science from the much more straightforward and reasoned logic of wanting to live a longer life, or experimenting with interesting new technologies. Here you're just smearing for its own sake. Also, cryogenics, for all its still tenuous science, is a far cry from purely mystical beliefs like medieval alchemy. By fixating on how absurd freezing seems to you only because current medicine can't reverse it yet without damage (though nothing material makes the idea impossible), you're scoffing at the idea in the same way as a priest from the 16th century probably would if you explained completely workable modern gene therapies and organ transplants to them.

mckravchyk 3y ago

> Aside from that, it would be interesting to see how people would act if they had lifespans of a thousand years - knowing that what you'll do to the environment, you'll have to bear the burden of yourself. How people would act? The masses would never change their way of thinking, meaning there would be no progress / change of culture as well as the danger of a bad culture persisting for millenias. At the same time you would see those in power conentrate even more power and it would be certainy power like you see in non-democratic countries, where one individual rules everyone, except that individual would never ever die. Imagine if Stalin has lived to this day. Now considering that, you would think that a 1984-like goverment with a supreme leader that lives for centuries would let the average person live forever in the first place? > versus guaranteed doom I would not call the death, complete absence of everything, following a life well lived, doom. Everything has an end. Of course if that happens too soon, that's a tragedy. > No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever. It's interesting to look at the opposite. If following death, there's no experience, no awareness, nothing. Then what is the now? what it means to be alive right now, to perceive and how is it different from the memories of the past and ideas of the future? It may sound far off, but in a way, we die every moment. And on a larger scale, the 8 y/o me, the 16 y/o me is no more, not in just terms of being made of different atoms, but in terms of identity. So you can also imagine that if a person lives thousands of years, they either experience many "deaths" over time or they live the same dull life for thousands of years - in which there was no point to live that long in the first place. I can share that fear though, but it would be more in the context of "you have x months / years" to live heard at a relatively young age with life feeling far from finished, but the longer I live and the more things I do and experience that I wanted to do and experience, I imagine the easier it is to come to terms and be grateful for what has happened already. Don't have anything against what they are doing and heck, if I could easily afford it, maybe I would even sign up - one way ticket to see what the future would be like (vs. nothing like you said). But I don't think it's that important and if humanity reverse engineers the brain so that a person can live for thousands of year, or potentially infenitely (I think that would be the biggest challenge that goes far beyond just stopping death, I would not expect a brain to work for hundreds of years without serious modifications), if everyone has an access to it, it's like one of those things like an omni-intelligent AI, something you would think everyone would be better off if it was never developed. I think it would be cool if aging was stopped (the prime years of adulthood are so short) but I'd wish there was some natural cap of say, 200 years max were the brain would just break down at the end and it would be very hard to make it work longer).