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Comment by VMG | Hacker News Reader

He went in for cancer treatment, so he clearly wanted to avoid death, which is what the essay is about.

Christopher is largely dismissive of the life-extension techniques that transhumanists espouse, such as cryogenic preservation: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/11/hitchens-...

Your site says you operate under Crocker's rules, Julian, so please hear me out. (And to Phil Welch: I understand, but allow me the claim that he probably would have agreed with the message. And even if the distastefulness depends on the probability of a dead man's agreement with a position, should we not prevent ourselves from lashing out at people who post the message so that people may at least read and decide for themselves on an issue as important as this?)

Firstly, Christopher is not dismissive of life-extension techniques that transhumanists espouse. If he could live longer right now due to a technique formerly classified a "espoused by transhumanists," he would choose to, as is evinced all over that essay. Rather, he is largely dismissive of life-extension techniques that don't work. The transhumanism part has nothing to do with it.

In that essay, cryonics is lumped in with the paragraph that discusses bad advice. So we can agree that Christopher considers cryonics as bad science, the same way he considers eating the granulated essence of the peach pit to prevent overwhelming growth of a malignant neoplasm bad science.

On the other hand, the rest of the essay discusses good science, that is, science which has been proven to work. He discusses its "near-miraculous" quality.

Perfusion of chemicals to preserve and prepare brain tissue is already textbook science, just not applied to whole brains. The case of Clive Wearing is one piece of an assortment of evidence that consciousness is a clever illusion (the philosopher of consciousness, Daniel Dennett, can say a lot here). Ultimately, cryonics is science that (by definition) has not been proved to work, but nonetheless serious science. Please don't deny that. Harvard neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth explains this much better than I could, so I leave the floor to him:

http://brainpreservation.org/documents/killed_by_bad_philoso...

This issue is much too important to worry about what's distasteful.

Christopher is largely dismissive of the life-extension techniques that transhumanists espouse, such as cryogenic preservation

I should have been clearer:

"Christopher Hitchens believes that most of the techniques that transhumanists think will lead to radically longer lifespans will not work."

I think that we are not in disagreement.

I see. Then I lay the claim that Hitchens did not have enough medical expertise to know what will or will not work, and conditional on something working, he would have espoused it, and conditional on it not working, he would have not have espoused it. As such, I further lay the claim that he would have been in favor of allowing people to evaluate the underlying science for themselves, in case he made a mistake and it does work.

Or he just didn't want to die of cancer, but rather of old age.

What does that even mean?

That would mean the goal is not escaping death per se. The goal could be escaping a painful death or particular kind of death. There was a hint of a false dilemma.

As I understand it, "old age" is a euphemism for "getting X after a certain age", where X is something like cancer.

I doubt it was specifically the painfulness of the particular death that he was trying to escape (by that particular action), as cancer treatment itself is painful. It seems to me more likely he was trying to escape preventable death, which is a broad category that could (but in Hitchens' mind probably did not) include aging itself.

I think the supposition that he saw death from aging as unpreventable is supported by his lack of explicit advocacy for anti-aging research and by his public dismissal of cryonics. But that's probably because the current evidence is too fuzzy. We don't have the ability to bring back a cryonics patient, and we do know the damage involved in preserving them is non-negligible.

If he actually saw reversible human cryopreservation in action, with negligible damage, I doubt he would have abstained from taking a ten or twenty year jaunt to the future to see if they have a better treatment available for his cancer, or any other disease of aging.

Going in for cancer treatment does not imply a philosophical commitment to human immortality. You people are the new Randroids.

Um. Why doesn't it?

Because when you think about it, that's a surprising thing about humans in general. Why do people who do not believe in immortality (as an ideal, I'm saying) still go in for cancer treatment?

To expand on what phil is saying: It is by itself logically consistent for someone to decide that there's enough fun left in their life and enough stuff that they need to do that they don't want to die now even if they don't necessarily mind dying in the indefinite future.

Humans don't live their lives as an exercise in exploring the rational consequences of consciously held principles. And actually, a lot of people don't go in for cancer treatment, because cancer treatment is fucking miserable and doesn't always extend your lifespan as much as you'd hope.

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