X-Message-Number: 7057
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Assumptions in Terror Management
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 17:03:42 +1000 (EST)

David Stodolsky writes,

>Any animal is programmed by evolution for survival, the cultural "buffer"
>arises because only humans know that they will die. This knowledge clashes
>with the survival instinct, thus generating "existential terror".
>Existential terror can occur without any physiological arousal, the person
>may not be terrified at all in the normal sense of the word, that is,
>frightened.

Why don't medical and life insurance sales encounter this "existential
terror"? What distinguishes cryonics as a particularly scary prospect under 
this theory? I think what's been posted so far doesn't answer this.

It seems to me that the only thing that differentiates cryonics from a
medical technique, in the popular mind, is the notion that it occurs
"after death". Non-cryonicists don't think that deanimation is any
different to death, so their underlying irrationality may be that, death
being a release from "terror", post-mortem medicine can only renew the
terror - something their survival instinct fights against.

It seems plain that the only way to deter such feelings is to attempt
to illustrate that deanimated people are still alive ... but of course,
if we could do that, all this psycho-babble would become nugatory. Still,
I look forward to Tim Freeman's noodling on alternative strategies.

Peter Merel.


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