Re: New to this group.

Chris Morgan wrote:
> 
> Greeting all,
> 
>       I've been facinated by the concept cryonics but that facination
> has lead to several questions regarding the wisdom of spending large
> quantities of money for an unproven idea.  First and formost,  what
> makes anyone think that people in the future would want to waste time,
> assets, money etc... on reviving an obsolete human body ?

   If it was possible to restore one or more people from the past today,
would you not do it?

   And there's no reason to assume that major assetts/resources would be
involved. Likely no more than the then-current medical technology
available to anyone.

   If in the future, we consider human life in general as worth saving,
why should the length of time involved matter? If it were possible
today, what would be the difference in morality of resuscitating someone
clinically dead for 45 minutes (as in drowing in cold water, which often
happens) as one that's clinically dead (but in a potentially restorable
state) for 45 years?

> Lets face
> it, the population isn't shrinking and why add another non-productive
> human to place a drain on food, housing, medicine etc... Be honest,
> what would anyone of us have to offer future populations ?

   What does anyone *today* have to add? (I know some pretty
unproductive people who have never been suspended. We all do.) How does
having been 'on ice' for most of a century change that question?

   Besides, even in the most optomistic scenario, I doubt the number of
people that will ever be suspended will exceed six figures. How much of
a pimple on population growth will that be? Overpopulation is an issue
of its own, cryonics or not.

>      My second question involved a religious perspective. Let's assume
> for a moment that the human body's consciousness is "the soul".

   Okay, but hardly a universal assumption, or a proven one.

> Since
> it's generally accepted that the soul departs the body immediately at
> death

   At what point is 'death?' Remember my drowning-under-ice scenario. Or
those people who are deliberately cooled, circulation halted, brain
activity stopped, for almost an hour, in order to operate on blood
vessels in the brain? Where's their soul then? Unless you jump into an
active volcano, at ground zero of a nuclear detonation, on a plane
diving straight into the ground, etc., the process of 'death' is not an
instanttaneous one. Medicine has always been about pushing back the
limit at which you can be recovered and restored. It's not finished.

   When a physician makes a legal decleration of death, s/he's making a
reasoned judgement at to your unrecoverability. But most of your body's
tissues are still metabolizing. There's no magic instant.

> what would be the point in attempting to revive an "empty shell"
> of a human being ?

   I have a friend who has a similar belief. But my feeling is summed up
by something that Charles Platt said on this issue: "If souls exist, we
don't know the rules by which they operate."

   Therefore, my attitude is (paraphrasing something once said about
war): "Freeze me anyway, let God sort it out."

   After all, if it doesn't work, I can't be *more* dead for having
tried.

   It's said that SF writer Robert Heinlein declined cryonics (even
though he used it well, in some of his stories, such as 'The Door into
Summer.') with the rationalization: "But what if it interferes with
rebirth (or maybe it was 'reincarnation')?" If that's so, then one has
to ask; would *any* particular form of death, and fate of one's body
also have an effect? Though not frozen nearly as well, what of, say,
Captain Laurence Oates, of the 1912 Scott Antarctic Expedition, who
severely frostbitten, and believing himself a drag on others, sacrificed
himself by leaving the tent during a storm. His body's still somewhere
out there. What of, say, his soul, under Heinlein's logic? *

   Does the fate of one's soul change if the body is frozen/ cremated/
embalmed /allowed to openly decompose? And at what point? I have to
think it hardly matters, if souls exist at all.

   On the other hand, successful cryonic suspension and revival, oculd
concievably be the ultimate near-death experience. (Also explored in the
Linda Nagata novel 'Tech Heaven.')
 

>      These questions aren't meant to inflame anybody, they're simply
> questions I've wondered about for years now.

   As have others.

--------------------------------

   *Though I've just learned there's a short SF story that I haven't
seen, using this event as a starting point....

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