X-Message-Number: 867
Subject: Vapid objections? (was: Freezing Injury)
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 92 10:59:55 -0400
From: 

Brian Wowk <> says:

>        This business about people of the future not caring to revive  
>"corpsicles" is one of the most vapid objections to concept of cryonics.

I disagree; it's the most serious objection I know of.  It wasn't
serious enough to keep me from signing up, though.

>  The  
>appropriate response can be summarized in two thoughts: 
> 
>1) On-going medical problems (read: market forces) will always propel  
>medicine towards capabilities for utimately reviving cryonics patients. 

I agree with this part...


>2) Large, dedicated cryonics organizations will, by their nature, possess the
>resources and determination to customize technologies as necessary for  
>treating even the most severely compromised of their patients.     

I agree that they will probably have the resources when the time
comes, barring political chaos and outbreaks of fundamentalist
deathism.  I'm not so sure they will have the determination.  I've
seen too many organizations respond to the incentives they live with
while ignoring their stated purpose.  

When reviving people becomes possible, there won't be any point in
freezing people any more, so the cryonics organizations will not have
any living customers they are responsible to.  Thus they can either
revive their patients and cease to exist, or they can continue to
store them.  Since long-lived organizations have a strong tendency to
continue to exist, this will work as a strong disincentive to revive
people.  

Relatives of the corpsicles may want them to be revived, but they
won't have the power since the cryonics organizations will have sole
legal control of the corpsicles.  

Thus I don't see anyone who will have both the power and the incentive
to revive us.  I hope I'm wrong here; can anyone point out an error?

If there isn't any error, then what can we do now to give cryonics
organizations an incentive to revive their patients?  

I have some thoughts about how to work around this potential problem,
but I'll wait a bit and see what others have to say, first.

Tim

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