I wish I had more of the knowledge that you have so that I could use it to update my models of people—at the moment, I can’t locate a place in my model to accommodate people being so reluctant to sign up for cryonics while believing that it could work.
(a) Could you give some information regarding the setting? Were these people that approached you, or did you approach them? Did you meet in a formal place, like an office in Alcor, or an informal setting, like on their way from one place to another?
(b)
The first and largest by far tended to be religious, which is to say, afterlife mythology. If you thought you were going to Heaven, Kolob, another plane of existence, or another body, you wouldn’t bother investing the money or emotional effort in cryonics.
How long would your conversations with these religious people be, on average? It seems they would have already made up their minds. How did their fear of screwing up their afterlife square with the typical belief that people can be resuscitated after ‘flat-lining’ in a hospital with souls intact?
(c)
Some people identified so deeply with their current social situation, the idea of losing that situation (family, friends, standing, culture, etc.) was unthinkable.
What would you think of the hypothesis that people don’t much value life outside their social connections? (A counter-argument is that people have taken boats and sailed to strange and foreign continents throughout history, but maybe they represent a small fraction of personalities.) Were people much more likely to sign up in groups of 3 or more?
(d)
Perhaps the majority were simply repulsed by any thought of death itself; most of them spent their lives trying not to think about the fact that we would die, and found it extremely depressing or disorienting when forced to confront that fact.
This I find least intuitive, because cryonics would be a way to be in denial about death. They could imagine that the probability of successful awakening is as high as they want it to be. Do you think that they could have been repulsed or disoriented by something else like—just speculating—a primal fear of being a zombie / being punished for being greedy / the emotional consequences of having unfounded hope in immortality?
If you have an interest in answering any subset of these questions, thanks in advance.
I wish I had more of the knowledge that you have so that I could use it to update my models of people—at the moment, I can’t locate a place in my model to accommodate people being so reluctant to sign up for cryonics while believing that it could work.
(a) Could you give some information regarding the setting? Were these people that approached you, or did you approach them? Did you meet in a formal place, like an office in Alcor, or an informal setting, like on their way from one place to another?
(b)
How long would your conversations with these religious people be, on average? It seems they would have already made up their minds. How did their fear of screwing up their afterlife square with the typical belief that people can be resuscitated after ‘flat-lining’ in a hospital with souls intact?
(c)
What would you think of the hypothesis that people don’t much value life outside their social connections? (A counter-argument is that people have taken boats and sailed to strange and foreign continents throughout history, but maybe they represent a small fraction of personalities.) Were people much more likely to sign up in groups of 3 or more?
(d)
This I find least intuitive, because cryonics would be a way to be in denial about death. They could imagine that the probability of successful awakening is as high as they want it to be. Do you think that they could have been repulsed or disoriented by something else like—just speculating—a primal fear of being a zombie / being punished for being greedy / the emotional consequences of having unfounded hope in immortality?
If you have an interest in answering any subset of these questions, thanks in advance.