“I lead a cryonics team and freeze people's brains for a living”
hopesandfears.com
hopesandfears.com
This is where things get incredibly weird for cryonics. Any competent practitioner is going to amass a large number of people who are legally dead today, but may be viewed as "just sleeping" in the future. Where is the boundary between these two states? At what point do these frozen brains transition from specimens with no rights to human beings?
Say that, in the not too distant future, the technology is invented to resurrect the frozen. At this point, the cryonics company will have something clearly different from medical specimens in their tanks. However, what if the resurrection tech is prohibitively expensive? Even at cryogenic temperatures there is atomic movement and, necessarily, slow and subtle degradation. Some frozen "sleepers" might not survive long enough for resurrection to become affordable enough for them, assuming the assets they set aside for resurrection weren't wiped out by bad investments. Do these doomed sleepers have any rights? Will the cryonics company be obligated to revive them at a loss? What if the company goes bankrupt? Could people be brought back as indentured "heads in jars" and expected to work off their debt? Will brains frozen today even have any skills or knowledge the future will want?
Cryonics raises a lot of questions for the present and, potentially, even more problems for the future to solve.
At Alcor, patient storage costs are paid from the Patient Care Trust. This conservative funding arrangement is designed to cover the cost of patient storage solely from the income from the Trust, thereby assuring that such funding will continue indefinitely into the future. The irrevocable Patient Care Trust is included under Alcor's tax-exempt status, but nevertheless is a separate legal entity that provides liability protection for these assets. This arrangement is one of the reasons our members have confidence in Alcor.
It doesn't do any good to use the most advanced techniques to get our members into cryopreservation unless we can keep them there, as well as build capital to eventually fund revival and reintegration. Ongoing care for cryopreservation patients is the number one element of our purpose in being cryonicists, and financial protection for the patients is a critical component of this. There is no use in starting this possibly centuries-long project, if we don't do centuries-long financial planning. Providing this kind of protection through a conservative, long-term view of storage costs is one of the main reasons why cryopreservation costs so much.
[1]: http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html
Legally. Not ethically. Most business owners in this "industry" could not care less.
E.g. mails that announce me that I won some lottery. Random people offering to sell me cheap "authentic" Rolex on the street. Attempts to bring down some government to bring "democracy" to a country. Cryonics.
Or do you think assuming everybody is moral in every line of business is a baseline for how the universe is and everything more cynical is some sort of extra-ordinary claim? If yes, then you'd be surprised.
That's the corollary to what P. T. Barnum said, that "there's a sucker born every minute".
What they do, is sell hope to rich people, working at the inside edges of pseudo-science.
Then consider you don't even have to be rich. As already noted on this very page (ed: I see you already noted that), it costs $80k to suspend your head with Alcor. Not $800k, which would still be pretty reasonable and not only for the rich, because someone in their 30s can pay only $60/mo for a 20-year life insurance policy paying out $1m.
Edit2: I'd also ask you to wonder if the company is evil, but trying to hide it so they can fool rich people, wouldn't they want to hide something like this which can be so easily used to characterize them as evil? http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html
If somebody’s been pronounced dead and then you start CPR, you don’t want the
embarrassing situation where they start to wake up again. For older people that
are really far gone it’s not a concern, but sometimes life can start
to come back a bit so general anesthetic takes care of that.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/256/t...
Heh, doctors have been known to be eager to "be done" with organ donors in some cases that look dead or dying enough. What's a seemingly dying person compared to all those that get to get new body parts, after all?
Combine it with stories of people coming back from comas or near-death, and it doesn't sound that good.
It's entirely possible that I might choose not to live forever someday if I have the choice, but I'd prefer for it to be my choice when I opt out of the rest of forever, rather than being left up to whenever my body happens to fall apart or be sufficiently damaged.
It would make an interesting theme for a novel, waking from a dreamless sleep only to face again the pains, disappointments and inevitable deterioration of this life, and this time separated from the people who once gave some solace. Don't sign me up.
No, but being rich helps with illusions of immortality and going with such a scheme.
Would you expect "substantive comments" to some post about the discovery of a perpetual motion machine or intelligent design?
Yeah, the idea is to do it before you die. You could e.g. setup a foundation to operate after your death and have in its statue (article of incorporation?) that if you ever return you get them back.
Besides technical solutions, like using cryptocurrency or simply burrying your assets somewhere only you know about where they'd be safe. Or use this, if those announcing it got anywhere and weren't scamers:
The Reanimation Foundation will, it is said, be the "first cryonics organization to enable individuals signed up for cryonics to take their money with them. It will be able to offer this service because it will be incorporated in Liechtenstein, which has no rule against perpetuities."
>There's no legal precedent for a person returning from the dead.
How about people being declared legally dead after gone missing and then re-appearing a few decades later. There have been several such cases in the past (sometimes those people got married elsewhere and started a new life, etc).
This is why the cryonics legal trusts are all designed to be financially self-sufficient in perpetuity: it's a long shot, but if you can get somebody frozen, you can potentially keep them as a meatsicle for Long Enough for somebody to invent medical nanites or machine-brain upload interfaces or whatever.
Do we have any non-human examples of this process, or is it 100% hope that the "flying cars" future will have a working process and it will be sufficiently effective to resurrect a human brain?
Also, do we even have a mental model of the steps and just not the technology or are we missing the mental steps, too?
A kidney's a lot less complicated than the brain, and that was 10 years ago. The research has been pretty underfunded. If you'd actually like the field to progress and uncover evidence for or against the prospect of those who have been suspended up until now ever even having the slimmest chance of revival greater than that of cremation, maybe you should encourage legislation that lets them test on volunteering criminals heading for lethal injection or other end-of-life volunteers who don't want to be preserved but are happy to contribute to Science or large animals. Don't get squeamish over experiments like this: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html
For thousands of years people dreamed of powered aircraft that could fly like birds. Many people thought it would aways be impossible, right up until it wasn't.
And even if you're that selfish, you could always throw some great parties with models and champagne, or pay to have your enemies killed...
Our technology has progressed enormously in the last 300 years and most likely will continue for another 300 years. So to me cryonics seems to be a reasonable investment.
Is it still at 0%, with no scientific basis at all other than the evidence-free religious devotion of the faithful devotees, constantly posting claims without a shred of solid evidence?
This is going to be zero by default even with perfect preservation, given that the whole point is to freeze people because current medical technology can't keep them reliably alive for whatever reason.
There's no reason to even think about trying to revive people (rather than simply preserving them as thoroughly as possible) until geriatrics, cancer medicine, or whatever have advanced considerably.