What if revival technology causes misery? (current objection). There are a few variations on this:
I would be an early adopter, which means that the technology for reviving people might still be experimental at the time when it is used on me. The unintentional result of this could be that I become a test subject.
What if they get reviving my brain slightly wrong and a small change in it’s structure or chemical composition means that all my consciousness is capable of experiencing is ultimate misery, and this goes on for some prolonged period of time where they’re assuming the reason I’m miserable is because of the shock of waking up in a world where so many of the people I know are dead and everything else is changed or gone, so nobody has any idea that it’s due to a chemical or structural problem in my actual brain.
What if I get brain damage or massive memory loss from the procedure? This would mean, essentially that I wasn’t saved. Then I would have to live as a sort of zombie-like horror.
I get some horrible and as yet unimagined disability due to, I don’t know, ice crystals destroying my tissues or amine accumulation or something unexpected.
Just because cryo is the only way we currently have to avoid death, that doesn’t mean it’s a good way.
What the heck? What if any technology X causes misery? It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony). This claim has been made repeatedly about all sorts of medical interventions, from organ transplants to cloning. Right now there are people who claim aspartame is turning us into zombie-like horrors.
There is always a risk from any medical intervention. A bad anesthesiologist can give you brain damage and turn you into a zombie when all you wanted to was have a wisdom tooth pulled. This objection is so generalized that I’m not sure it’s a true objection at all. I think you may be searching for other objections rather than stating a true objection.
It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony).
Did someone actually suggest that? A cursory glance through some articles shows, for instance, the Pope expressing worry that women would be used as ‘baby factories’, but questions about IVF seem to have, historically, been tied up with worries about custom-designed people.
Yes. I suppose it depends a bit on how official you require the suggester to be before you’re willing to grant that it was a legitimate social discourse. A few examples:
Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today’s “Faith & Reason” column asked her readers “Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God?” in 2010.
People have reported asking priests for advice and being told ” He told them that if they were to go ahead with it, they would be doing something worse than abortion, their child would be born without a soul as he or she would be manmade and not Godmade.”
There’s various crazy ministries on the internet that make/made the soulless claims as well.
So yes, someone did actually suggest that. Multiple someones. How much they count is debatable.
Yeah, I don’t mean the crazy-ministry people, I mean people connected enough to reality that they wouldn’t say that sort of thing now, but who did right up to the point where normal human babies showed up and the position became unsupportable.
Maybe I’m looking too far into this, but I’m trying to understand how you could look at a person pretty much indistinguishable from other people and claim that they have all of these hilariously weird properties. I can see if happening if people conceived via IVF all had red hair or something, but people did know these would be, y’know, people conceived in-vitro, right?
/shrug. The concept of souls is unsupportable right now but it doesn’t stop anyone from claiming all sorts of hilariously weird properties for them. I don’t know how hard it would be to say that one person has an unsupportable property X and another person doesn’t, since they’re both just naked assertion anyway. When your references are that detached from reality you can start saying all sorts of nonsensical crap.
There’s no reason to experiment o cryo patients. Lots of people donate their brains to science. Grab somebody who isn’t expecting to be resurrected, and test your technology on them. Worst case, you wake up somebody who doesn’t want to be alive, and they kill themselves.
Number two is very unlikely. We’re basically talking brain damage, and I’ve never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.
As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You’d just be dead, which is the default case. Also, I have my doubts that they’d even bother to try to resurrect you with that much damage if they didn’t already have a way of patching the gaps in your neurology.
As for number four, depending on the degree of the disability, suicide or euthanasia is probably possible. Besides, I think it’s unlikely they’ll be able to drag you back from being a corpsicle without being able to fix problems like that.
There’s no way not to. It will be a new technology. Somebody has to get reanimated first. Even if we freeze 100 mice to test on, or monkeys, reviving humans will be different. Doing something for the first time is, by it’s very nature, an experiment.
Grab somebody who isn’t expecting to be resurrected
Awful! That’s experimenting on a person against their will, and without their knowledge, even! I sure hope people like you don’t start freezing people like me in the event that I decide against cryo...
I’ve never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.
People experience this every day. It’s called chemical depression. Even if you don’t currently see a way for preservation or revival technology to cause this condition, it exists, it’s possible that more than one mechanism may exist to trigger it, and that these technologies may have that as an accidental side-effect.
As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You’d just be dead, which is the default case.
Uh… no, because I’d be experiencing life, I would just be without what makes me me. That would be horror, not non-existence. So it is not death.
euthanasia is probably possible
Is it now? Most people don’t believe in the right to die. In a world where we had figured out how to reanimate preserved corpses, do you think that they’ll believe in the right to die? They’ll probably automatically save and revive everyone.
Awful! That’s experimenting on a person against their will, and without their knowledge, even! I sure hope people like you don’t start freezing people like me in the event that I decide against cryo...
-shrug- so don’t leave your brain to science. I figure if somebody is prepared to let their brain decompose on a table while first year medical students poke at it, you might as well try to save their life. Provided, of course, the laws wherever you are permit you to put the results down if they’re horrible. Worst case, they’re back where they started.
People experience this every day. It’s called chemical depression. Even if you don’t currently see a way for preservation or revival technology to cause this condition, it exists, it’s possible that more than one mechanism may exist to trigger it, and that these technologies may have that as an accidental side-effect.
Chemical depression is not ‘absolute misery.’ Besides, we know how to treat that now. That we’ll be able to bring you back, but unable to tweak your brain activity a little is not very credible. Worst case, once we have the scan, we can always put it back on ice for another decade or two until we can fix the problem.
Uh… no, because I’d be experiencing life, I would just be without what makes me me. That would be horror, not non-existence. So it is not death.
If I took a bunch of Drexler-class nanotech, took your brain, and restructured its material to be a perfect replica of my brain, that would be murder. You would cease to exist. The person living in your head would be me, not you. If brain damage is adequately severe, then you don’t exist any more. The ‘thing that makes you you’ is necessary to ‘do the experiencing.’
See disability arguments on the other comment for personality-preserving brain damage.
Then I would have to live as a sort of zombie-like horror.
Well, no. You’d just be dead. There’d be a Schiavo-like body looking like yours, or a new person in a body looking like yours, but that doesn’t seem to add much to the horror of death.
this goes on for some prolonged period of time where they’re assuming the reason I’m miserable is because of the shock of waking up in a world where so many of the people I know are dead and everything else is changed or gone, so nobody has any idea that it’s due to a chemical or structural problem in my actual brain.
That sounds like a weird change. Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event, less if it gets really bad, and even less in practice. How prolonged are you thinking of?
People who age often get depression, and get the worst disabilities because they can’t adapt fast and their disabilities keep increasing. Do you accept “I should kill myself now, so I don’t run that risk”? If not, how is that different.
This thing that would not die though, this ability to know pain and pleasure, this continuing experience, it would remain in the event that my memories were all gone, presumably. THAT is the part I’m worried about. That the part of me that feels could wake up and have to go through the experience of realizing that who I am has been lost to brain damage.
Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event
Is this supposed to rebut my objection? I don’t see where you’re going with this at all.
Do you accept “I should kill myself now, so I don’t run that risk”? If not, how is that different.
Right now, there isn’t a guarantee that I’m going to go through a medical procedure anytime soon. Going through a medical procedure, especially one that is new, or one that few people have been through, is likely to cause some sort of horrible side effects. We have no reason to assume that this technology will be flawless by the time we get to use it, no reason to believe it won’t turn us into horrors.
It’s different because not killing myself right now leaves me with a reasonable chance to have some number of happy years ahead whereas going through a medical procedure with unexpected side effects and risks may have a much greater chance of making me completely miserable for a long time.
I think our disagreement may have a lot to do with how much faith we place in the medical establishment.
If you haven’t got experience with it, you can’t know how bad it can be. Have you ever looked into how incompetent and horrible medical professionals and treatments can be?
That the part of me that feels could wake up and have to go through the experience of realizing that who I am has been lost to brain damage.
Okay, that’s freaky. Only a little freakier than “The child I was has been replaced by an adult”, but point taken.
Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event
Is this supposed to rebut my objection? I don’t see where you’re going with this at all.
If medicine when you wake up if anything like it is now, after a couple months at most you’ll be able to say “Doc, I feel utterly miserable” and the doc will answer “One box of magic future antidepressants, coming right up!”, not (only) “Well duh it’s future shock”.
Have you ever looked into how incompetent and horrible medical professionals and treatments can be?
I have a pile of statistics if you want a shock.
Only in specific cases (medical errors, psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes). Can I haz stats?
What if revival technology causes misery? (current objection). There are a few variations on this:
I would be an early adopter, which means that the technology for reviving people might still be experimental at the time when it is used on me. The unintentional result of this could be that I become a test subject.
What if they get reviving my brain slightly wrong and a small change in it’s structure or chemical composition means that all my consciousness is capable of experiencing is ultimate misery, and this goes on for some prolonged period of time where they’re assuming the reason I’m miserable is because of the shock of waking up in a world where so many of the people I know are dead and everything else is changed or gone, so nobody has any idea that it’s due to a chemical or structural problem in my actual brain.
What if I get brain damage or massive memory loss from the procedure? This would mean, essentially that I wasn’t saved. Then I would have to live as a sort of zombie-like horror.
I get some horrible and as yet unimagined disability due to, I don’t know, ice crystals destroying my tissues or amine accumulation or something unexpected.
Just because cryo is the only way we currently have to avoid death, that doesn’t mean it’s a good way.
What the heck? What if any technology X causes misery? It was argued that in vitro fertilization would cause soulless humans to be born (seriously) with all sorts of ramifications (from them destroying society, to their existence being constant agony). This claim has been made repeatedly about all sorts of medical interventions, from organ transplants to cloning. Right now there are people who claim aspartame is turning us into zombie-like horrors.
There is always a risk from any medical intervention. A bad anesthesiologist can give you brain damage and turn you into a zombie when all you wanted to was have a wisdom tooth pulled. This objection is so generalized that I’m not sure it’s a true objection at all. I think you may be searching for other objections rather than stating a true objection.
Did someone actually suggest that? A cursory glance through some articles shows, for instance, the Pope expressing worry that women would be used as ‘baby factories’, but questions about IVF seem to have, historically, been tied up with worries about custom-designed people.
Yes. I suppose it depends a bit on how official you require the suggester to be before you’re willing to grant that it was a legitimate social discourse. A few examples:
Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today’s “Faith & Reason” column asked her readers “Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God?” in 2010.
People have reported asking priests for advice and being told ” He told them that if they were to go ahead with it, they would be doing something worse than abortion, their child would be born without a soul as he or she would be manmade and not Godmade.”
There’s various crazy ministries on the internet that make/made the soulless claims as well.
So yes, someone did actually suggest that. Multiple someones. How much they count is debatable.
Yeah, I don’t mean the crazy-ministry people, I mean people connected enough to reality that they wouldn’t say that sort of thing now, but who did right up to the point where normal human babies showed up and the position became unsupportable.
Maybe I’m looking too far into this, but I’m trying to understand how you could look at a person pretty much indistinguishable from other people and claim that they have all of these hilariously weird properties. I can see if happening if people conceived via IVF all had red hair or something, but people did know these would be, y’know, people conceived in-vitro, right?
/shrug. The concept of souls is unsupportable right now but it doesn’t stop anyone from claiming all sorts of hilariously weird properties for them. I don’t know how hard it would be to say that one person has an unsupportable property X and another person doesn’t, since they’re both just naked assertion anyway. When your references are that detached from reality you can start saying all sorts of nonsensical crap.
There’s no reason to experiment o cryo patients. Lots of people donate their brains to science. Grab somebody who isn’t expecting to be resurrected, and test your technology on them. Worst case, you wake up somebody who doesn’t want to be alive, and they kill themselves.
Number two is very unlikely. We’re basically talking brain damage, and I’ve never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.
As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You’d just be dead, which is the default case. Also, I have my doubts that they’d even bother to try to resurrect you with that much damage if they didn’t already have a way of patching the gaps in your neurology.
As for number four, depending on the degree of the disability, suicide or euthanasia is probably possible. Besides, I think it’s unlikely they’ll be able to drag you back from being a corpsicle without being able to fix problems like that.
There’s no way not to. It will be a new technology. Somebody has to get reanimated first. Even if we freeze 100 mice to test on, or monkeys, reviving humans will be different. Doing something for the first time is, by it’s very nature, an experiment.
Awful! That’s experimenting on a person against their will, and without their knowledge, even! I sure hope people like you don’t start freezing people like me in the event that I decide against cryo...
People experience this every day. It’s called chemical depression. Even if you don’t currently see a way for preservation or revival technology to cause this condition, it exists, it’s possible that more than one mechanism may exist to trigger it, and that these technologies may have that as an accidental side-effect.
Uh… no, because I’d be experiencing life, I would just be without what makes me me. That would be horror, not non-existence. So it is not death.
Is it now? Most people don’t believe in the right to die. In a world where we had figured out how to reanimate preserved corpses, do you think that they’ll believe in the right to die? They’ll probably automatically save and revive everyone.
-shrug- so don’t leave your brain to science. I figure if somebody is prepared to let their brain decompose on a table while first year medical students poke at it, you might as well try to save their life. Provided, of course, the laws wherever you are permit you to put the results down if they’re horrible. Worst case, they’re back where they started.
Chemical depression is not ‘absolute misery.’ Besides, we know how to treat that now. That we’ll be able to bring you back, but unable to tweak your brain activity a little is not very credible. Worst case, once we have the scan, we can always put it back on ice for another decade or two until we can fix the problem.
If I took a bunch of Drexler-class nanotech, took your brain, and restructured its material to be a perfect replica of my brain, that would be murder. You would cease to exist. The person living in your head would be me, not you. If brain damage is adequately severe, then you don’t exist any more. The ‘thing that makes you you’ is necessary to ‘do the experiencing.’
See disability arguments on the other comment for personality-preserving brain damage.
Well, no. You’d just be dead. There’d be a Schiavo-like body looking like yours, or a new person in a body looking like yours, but that doesn’t seem to add much to the horror of death.
That sounds like a weird change. Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event, less if it gets really bad, and even less in practice. How prolonged are you thinking of?
People who age often get depression, and get the worst disabilities because they can’t adapt fast and their disabilities keep increasing. Do you accept “I should kill myself now, so I don’t run that risk”? If not, how is that different.
This thing that would not die though, this ability to know pain and pleasure, this continuing experience, it would remain in the event that my memories were all gone, presumably. THAT is the part I’m worried about. That the part of me that feels could wake up and have to go through the experience of realizing that who I am has been lost to brain damage.
Is this supposed to rebut my objection? I don’t see where you’re going with this at all.
Right now, there isn’t a guarantee that I’m going to go through a medical procedure anytime soon. Going through a medical procedure, especially one that is new, or one that few people have been through, is likely to cause some sort of horrible side effects. We have no reason to assume that this technology will be flawless by the time we get to use it, no reason to believe it won’t turn us into horrors.
It’s different because not killing myself right now leaves me with a reasonable chance to have some number of happy years ahead whereas going through a medical procedure with unexpected side effects and risks may have a much greater chance of making me completely miserable for a long time.
I think our disagreement may have a lot to do with how much faith we place in the medical establishment.
If you haven’t got experience with it, you can’t know how bad it can be. Have you ever looked into how incompetent and horrible medical professionals and treatments can be?
I have a pile of statistics if you want a shock.
Okay, that’s freaky. Only a little freakier than “The child I was has been replaced by an adult”, but point taken.
If medicine when you wake up if anything like it is now, after a couple months at most you’ll be able to say “Doc, I feel utterly miserable” and the doc will answer “One box of magic future antidepressants, coming right up!”, not (only) “Well duh it’s future shock”.
Only in specific cases (medical errors, psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes). Can I haz stats?