Well, I’d chalk up today’s lack of enthusiam towards cryonics as more ignorance than anything else. You do have a point though; we do not seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping people from dying. If anything, we seem to embrace it.
Cryonics is also an instance of this, but I actually had more vanilla sorts of altruism in mind when I wrote the comment, such as medical care, clean water, mosquito nets...the resources to prevent premature death exist, I don’t think ignorance is really an issue, and the average citizen even agrees that we aught to do more, and no one really embraces pre-mature death...and yet it doesn’t always happen, largely because of the idiosyncrasies of our resource allocation system.
So my meaning is, in the future, if some frozen corpses fall through the cracks of the future resource allocation system, I wouldn’t consider that as evidence that this future is inferior to the present, nor would I consider it a strange future with alien values. Our present age allows people to fall through the cracks in much more egregious ways.
Well, I’d chalk up today’s lack of enthusiam towards cryonics as more ignorance than anything else. You do have a point though; we do not seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping people from dying. If anything, we seem to embrace it.
Cryonics is also an instance of this, but I actually had more vanilla sorts of altruism in mind when I wrote the comment, such as medical care, clean water, mosquito nets...the resources to prevent premature death exist, I don’t think ignorance is really an issue, and the average citizen even agrees that we aught to do more, and no one really embraces pre-mature death...and yet it doesn’t always happen, largely because of the idiosyncrasies of our resource allocation system.
So my meaning is, in the future, if some frozen corpses fall through the cracks of the future resource allocation system, I wouldn’t consider that as evidence that this future is inferior to the present, nor would I consider it a strange future with alien values. Our present age allows people to fall through the cracks in much more egregious ways.