Why Cryonics Makes Sense

John Newman jnn at synfin.org
Sat Dec 16 18:27:17 PST 2017



> On Dec 15, 2017, at 3:55 AM, Douglas Lucas <dal at riseup.net> wrote:
> 
> Rudy Rucker on cryonics:
> 
> ===
> Well, I’ve been friends with the cryonicist Charles Platt for about
> twenty years so I’ve grown a little jaded about this. So I’ll go ahead
> and give you a somewhat obnoxious answer along the lines of what I might
> say to Charles. I’d much rather rot in the ground. What’s the big
> problem with dying anyway? I mean, what’s so frigging special about my
> one particular mind? I don’t want to be God, I want to be a human with
> my spark of God Consciousness. Think of a field of daisies: they bloom,
> they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the
> same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy
> iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it? In my unhumble opinion, you can
> never really reach any serenity till you fully accept the fundamental
> fact of your mortality. It’s the great Koan that life hands you: Hi,
> here you are, isn’t this great, you’re going to die. Deal with it. This
> said, can cryonics work? I think dry nanotechnology is probably a
> dead-end. As I argue in Saucer Wisdom, wet nanotechnology, a.k.a.
> biotech, is where it’s going to be at. In other words, if you want a new
> body five hundred years from now, the way to get one will be to have
> someone grow one from a clone based on a copy of your DNA, not by trying
> to retrofit your kilos of frozen meat. The hard part, of course, is
> replicating your mind — and remember that you have somatic knowledge in
> your body as well as just in your brain. I have a feeling that copying a
> mind from one host to the next will require a totally new breakthrough,
> perhaps along the lines of Quantum Tantra. One final jab at cryonics. We
> already have too many people, so why would any future society every put
> any significant energy into bringing back the dead? How much energy will
> the citizens of Year 3000 care to put into producing a brand new Ted
> Wiilliams? You can rant all you like about contracts and trust funds you
> set up, but God know it’s a simple thing for crooks to screw a dead
> person out of his or her supposedly inviolate trust fund. Enron took
> down California for billions last spring, even with a seemingly living
> chief of state.
> ===
> 
> Source:
> http://turingchurch.com/2013/02/23/interview-with-rudy-rucker/
> 


Thanks, I hadn’t seen that :)  Rudy writes such fantastic books.


John





>> On 12/14/2017 11:40 PM, grarpamp wrote:
>> https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
>> (Great blogs BTW)
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/knfcx/i_am_signed_up_for_cryonics_at_my_death_ama/
>> http://www.alcor.org/blog/hal-finney-becomes-alcors-128th-patient/
>> 
>> Cypherpunks will be needed in the future, even if only to break
>> out of the Matrix. Avoid info death...
>> 
>> 
>> Imagine a patient arriving in an ambulance to Hospital A, a typical
>> modern hospital. The patient's heart stopped 15 minutes before the
>> EMTs arrived and he is immediately pronounced dead at the hospital.
>> What if, though, the doctors at Hospital A learned that Hospital B
>> across the street had developed a radical new technology that could
>> revive a patient anytime within 60 minutes after cardiac arrest with
>> no long-term damage? What would the people at Hospital A do?
>> 
>> Of course, they would rush the patient across the street to Hospital B
>> to save him. If Hospital B did save the patient, then by definition
>> the patient wouldn't actually have been dead in Hospital A, just
>> pronounced dead because Hospital A viewed him as entirely and without
>> exception doomed.
>> 
>> What cryonicists suggest is that in many cases where today a patient
>> is pronounced dead, they’re not dead but rather doomed, and that there
>> is a Hospital B that can save the day—but instead of being in a
>> different place, it's in a different time. It's in the future.
>> 



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