he signed up with a cryonics company called Alcor, which cryogenically freezes dead bodies so that they can be resurrected at some future date, when the necessary technology becomes available
wait wait wait wait, hold up, record scratch
I thought the cryogenics thing was about being frozen while alive so that you can be woken up in the future once we know how to extend human life to like hundreds of years or so, kinda like the Walt Disney urban legend. That at least has some intuitive appeal to it. Now you’re telling me it’s about literal fucking resurrection? Like they want to become lich kings or something? That’s somehow an order of magnitude dumber, like you’re not betting on “we figure out waking people up and cure cancer sometime in the future” you’re betting on “WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD AND RELISH IN THE NEW AGE OF UNDEAD MAN”
I was neutral to positive on cryonics until a friend went to sign up for it. (The one who introduced me to LessWrong.) Then I looked into it and was like “w h a t t h e”
@dgerard I have a strong recollection that Keith Henson had intimate involvement with a cryonics project and actual published a rather harrowing account. Should be searchable.
It’s actually not legal to freeze someone who’s still alive, because the freezing process is decidedly lethal. They have to replace your blood to try and minimize cell damage from ice crystals and so on. Then there’s the “budget” option where they just chop off your head and freeze that rather than mess with your whole body, for people with a very specific level of magitech in mind for their resurrection.
Now, there is a time in history where we got good enough at resurrection that they legally redefined death. In like the 70s they changed the definition of legally dead from having your heart stop to a cessation of brain activity because we got really good at restarting people’s hearts. But it’s a weirdly specific leap from “we can restart your heart” to “we can reconstruct you from just a head in a way that will have a meaningful and tangible connection to your current life”, but not all the way to “we can reconstruct you ex nihilo by retracing the quantum echoes your life created in the Force or whatever”.
wait wait wait wait, hold up, record scratch
I thought the cryogenics thing was about being frozen while alive so that you can be woken up in the future once we know how to extend human life to like hundreds of years or so, kinda like the Walt Disney urban legend. That at least has some intuitive appeal to it. Now you’re telling me it’s about literal fucking resurrection? Like they want to become lich kings or something? That’s somehow an order of magnitude dumber, like you’re not betting on “we figure out waking people up and cure cancer sometime in the future” you’re betting on “WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD AND RELISH IN THE NEW AGE OF UNDEAD MAN”
I was neutral to positive on cryonics until a friend went to sign up for it. (The one who introduced me to LessWrong.) Then I looked into it and was like “w h a t t h e”
https://sh.itjust.works/post/23693839
@dgerard I have a strong recollection that Keith Henson had intimate involvement with a cryonics project and actual published a rather harrowing account. Should be searchable.
yeah, he was in the Extropians
It’s actually not legal to freeze someone who’s still alive, because the freezing process is decidedly lethal. They have to replace your blood to try and minimize cell damage from ice crystals and so on. Then there’s the “budget” option where they just chop off your head and freeze that rather than mess with your whole body, for people with a very specific level of magitech in mind for their resurrection.
Now, there is a time in history where we got good enough at resurrection that they legally redefined death. In like the 70s they changed the definition of legally dead from having your heart stop to a cessation of brain activity because we got really good at restarting people’s hearts. But it’s a weirdly specific leap from “we can restart your heart” to “we can reconstruct you from just a head in a way that will have a meaningful and tangible connection to your current life”, but not all the way to “we can reconstruct you ex nihilo by retracing the quantum echoes your life created in the Force or whatever”.