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.
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.