X-Message-Number: 28484
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:17:53 -0400
From: Francois <>
Subject: On the difficulties to sell cryonics.

I have been musing for some time on the reasons that make cryonics so hard 
to "sell", and all the different ideas I have been exposed to or have come 
up with have recently come together is a semi coherent hypothesis. Lets see 
if I can write down this hypothesis in a way that will make a little sense 
to those who read it. Essentially, I believe that cryonics is difficult to 
sell because, although it is not itself a religion, it involves the same 
very deep psychological mechanisms that religions are based on. Allow me to 
explain.

Humans are unique in two ways that are significant to the problem. First, we 
have a clear awareness of our own inevitable death. We are mortal and we 
know it. No other creature experiences this. Second, our awareness of time 
is not limited to the present. Animals do not dwell on past hardships, nor 
do they anticipate future ones. They deal with what happens to them in the 
present. They will react once a crisis presents itself and return to their 
normal behavior once it is passed. Of course, a dog will react badly if a 
man who is in the habit of beating him comes in his presence. The dog will 
"anticipate" the beating because he has "memories" of past beatings 
inflicted by that man. But if the man is not present, the dog will not worry 
himself sick at the tought of what he may do to him in the future, or has 
done to him in the past. Humans will worry themselves sick doing just that. 
They can even imagine possible future hardships that may or may not happen, 
or fabricate memories about harships they never experienced in reality. In 
other words, not only do we have a keen awareness of our own mortality, we 
carry with us throughout our lives a burden of hardship that spans a whole 
lifetime, and even more.

An illustration of the effect this could have on a sentient mind can be 
found in the movie Project X. In that movie, the army was studying the 
effects of exposure to radiation on a fighter pilot in the event of an 
atomic war. They wanted to know how much exposure to radiation a pilot could 
sustain and still be effective. They were using chimpanzees as test 
subjects. In the end the experiment was declared invalid because a chimp 
would work on his task until radiation sickness physically stopped him, 
while a human pilot would get demoralized by the knowledge of his certain 
death and would stop being an effective fighter long before he actually 
became too sick to fly. The first sentient humans probably had to cope with 
a similar morale problem.

Of course, we also carry a lifetime of good memories during our lives, but I 
have observed that people tend to dwell on the bad stuff much more than the 
good stuff, and good memories would still not help with the certain 
knowledge of our mortality. Something better had to be found, and it was. At 
the same time humans were evolving sentience, they were also confronted with 
many subjective phenomena, like dreams, hallucinations, naturally occuring 
mind altering drugs, temporal lobe epilepsy and other so called altered 
states of counciousness. These seemed to indicate the existence of another 
reality inhabited by all sorts of strange entities. It is not uncommon for 
us to dream of recently departed loved ones. Such dreams often take on a 
very compelling air of reality and make us feel like we have really been 
visited by the dead parent or friend. Undoubtedly, this feeling would have 
been even stronger in the case of the first humans because they really had 
no experience telling them otherwise. And so, sentience evolved confronted 
with certain mortality and at the same time with the apparent survival of 
people beyond death. The first sentient minds were shaped as much by these 
sujective experiences as they were by the demands of their environment. 
Something emerged from these interractions, a new and never before seen 
instinct that could be called faith.

Faith can be seen as a veil put by evolution in front of the oblivion abyss 
we will all enter, sooner or later. It hides that abyss from everyday 
conciousness, it gives hope and it provides meaning to our existence. To 
work properly, it cannot be questionned. Since any such questioning will be 
percieved as an attack on our safety, it will evoke reactions similar to the 
ones evoked by physical attacks, like running away, anger or outright 
hostility. In this context, religion can be seen as whatetever a culture 
chooses to paint over the veil of faith. Religion becomes identified with 
faith, attacks on religion become attacks on faith itself and therefore 
attacks on our very lives. The emotional connexions at work here are very 
strong because they involve our survival instinct, a powerful emotion if 
there ever was one.

What does this have to do with cryonics and the difficulties to "convert" 
people to it? Well, there is a phrase in the Death in the Deep Freeze video 
that sums it up very well. "The foundations of society and religion are 
built on the certainty of death, and cryonics is a practice that strikes at 
the very core of this notion." In other words, to accept cryonics, one must 
lift the veil of faith and confront the abyss it hides, and we have hundreds 
of thousands, possibly even millions of years of evolution that opposes this 
action with incredible strength. It is not an easy thing to do. It is 
certainly not something you can "convert" someone to. In order to get 
someone there, you must guide them gently and allow them to follow their own 
path or you literally risk destroying their sanity. And you will also at the 
same time evoke a great ammount of hostility from the general public. This, 
I'm afraid, is unavoidable.

But there is something else in the video that makes me a little more 
optimistic. It is obvious that cryonics, once accepted, can provide the same 
sort of meaning and comfort as faith does. You only have to listen to and 
watch Michael and Anita Riskin to realize that. Unlike faith, cryonics does 
not hide the oblivion abyss, it provides a way to get through it, it makes 
it a finite obstacle and puts something attainable beyond it. And unlike 
faith, it is something physical over which we have some control. With the 
research being conducted in the domain of cryopreservation, sooner or later 
someone will succeed in suspending and reviving a complete living creature, 
dog, rat, monkey, whatever. At that point, cryonics will become a lot more 
attractive and these facts make me believe that it will someday become much 
more widely accepted. Until then, it simply cannot compete effectively with 
faith and religion. It will continue to be opposed by the general public and 
it will remain the domain of people who manage to accept their inevitable 
mortality through their own power of reason. That's a rare breed indeed.

Francois

Good health is merely the slowest
possible rate at which one can die. 

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