This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I depend upon society to help me explore what the ethical issues are so that I can make up my own mind in an informed way. I’m not an ethicist or a pastor, I’ve specialized in a different area.
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all.
It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.
This just breaks my heart, because I can understand the fear. I wouldn’t want to have children if I thought they’d be taken away from me. But if I already had them, I would want them alive first and foremost. Even if that meant they’d be taken away. Living far away > dying in my arms.
I can imagine my kids in bad situations, and in most of those situations I would want them to keep living. If I was dying during some kind of terrible revolution, I wouldn’t kill my children to protect them from an unknown future. They’re already alive, come what may.
Cryonics feels like a choice again, and for me this is a moral choice—perhaps a deontological one. I am willing to hear a variety of moral solutions/arguments, I just think this is something that needs address.
I wrote in another comment,
By “cryonics feels like a choice again”, do you mean it bears emotional similarity to choosing to have children in the first place, more than choosing to let them go on living, and therefore you wouldn’t sign your children up to be revived under any circumstances you wouldn’t have chosen to have them in the first place?
If so, I hope you will do everything you can to reverse that impression. Think of the frozen people as asleep, comatose, blinking, time-traveling—not dead. They will be revived not as infants, not as new people, not as ontologically unrelated snippets of personhood wearing secondhand names—they will wake up. If your children are frozen and revived, then afterwards, they will be alive. If your children are not frozen and revived, then absent really convenient timing, they will be dead.
This sounds reasonable to me, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t feel conclusive. Maybe I’m just waiting for the revolutionary to contribute his necessary component.
Last night, I had a sad dream that my brother’s little child passed away. (I guess my brain thought this was safe, because my brother doesn’t have kids.) The dream just had one theme: the regret that I felt that when the child died, she was gone forever.
My dream was just an emotion and didn’t address my waking concerns at all. It so happened in my dream that the child died in a way that was perfect for cryo-preservation, and there was an infrastructure for cryonics in the sense that everyone else in the family decided to sign up for cryonics just a little bit later. The extreme sadness was that they would continue in the future forever without the little one. The sadness of her being left behind was very painful.
Don’t leave your children behind. You don’t have the problem with them that I have with my sister. You have the power to sign them up. You don’t have to let your imaginary niece’s fate happen to your kids.
You seem to be thinking as if a person dies, and then cryonics is a way that can maybe bring them back to life. It is more accurate to say that a person loses the capacity to to sustain their own life (and experience it), and cryonics is a way to keep them alive until potential future technology can restore their ability to sustain and experience their life.