This was the first time I have seen Darwin’s blog and it ate up much of my afternoon. He presents the most impassioned cryonics arguments I have seen. In particular the AIDS activism post is something I could recommend to anybody including die-hard cryonics haters.
Does Darwin ever post on LessWrong, and if not I would be curious why not?
To me the reason conventional wisdom treats cryonics with disdain may be summed up in two cultural memes: 1.) Walt Disney’s frozen head and 2.) Ted Williams’s frozen head. The disdain is like a fashion consensus. I doubt we will live long enough to ever see any public figure’s pro publicity people endorsing a pro-cryonics stance.
The reason I haven’t posted here before is that I’ve had no burning reason to, and I’m busy.
While there are many discrete reasons why cryonics hasn’t been (more) successful, the single biggest reason is the most obvious one; it has not been demonstrably shown to work. If suspended animation were a demonstrated reality tomorrow, and it was affordable (i.e., not like spaceflight, which is demonstrably workable, but not yet affordable) then the tide would be turned. Even then, it is unlikely there would be any kind of flash-stampede to the freezers.
A schoolmate and friend of mine just died a few weeks ago of pulmonary fibrosis. He was an ideal candidate for a lung transplant. But, he couldn’t afford it, so he just laid there and died. Thousands of people who need transplants die each year, even though it is a proven modality of treatment that is yielding a significant number of quality years of life. But, it is costly, there aren’t enough donors, and here’s the really remarkable thing, the vast majority of people who could benefit from a transplant are never even candidates.
Consider Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway: http://www.rickross.com/reference/amway/amway24.html. In 1983 DeVos, suffering from coronary artery disease, had bypass surgery. In 1992 DeVos had another bypass surgery, and by 1995 it was clear he had end stage congestive heart failure (CHF). How many people have you known or heard about who fit that description, and subsequently go on to die a perfectly pedestrian death; at home or in the ICU? Such deaths are so routine no one gives them a second thought.
And it’s for damn sure that no one gives them a second thought when the patient is a 71 year old man! However, if you are absolutely fixated on staying alive, and your net worth is well in excess of 2 billion 1997 dollars, well, the rules of the game are different for you. DeVos got his heart in London, and the Amway corporate jet flew him there from Grand Rapids, MI. That was in 1997, and as far as I know, DeVos is still alive. There are countless ~71 year old men in the US, and elsewhere in the Developed World, dying of CHF right now. In those cases, the word “transplant” is neither uttered nor heard – even though it is very much a reality that if you have the money, the persistence and the luck – a heart transplant offers the prospect of another 5 years of reasonably good quality life, on average.
I worked in hospital, mostly in critical care medicine, for 7 years. The overwhelming majority of patients are passive – they do what their physicians advise and if they do have alternative ideas, they are usually easily dissuaded from pursuing them. And, truth to tell, most of the “alternative ideas” patients have are bad ones, including Steve Jobs. But, if you are smart, lucky and rich – and you come to your senses, as Jobs did, it can be whole other ball game. Jobs suffered recurrent pancreatic cancer (islet cell neuroendocrine tumor) after a Whipple procedure in 2004. That is just about as close as you can get to a death sentence, since the usual location of the met(s) is the liver. It is current medical consensus that liver transplantation in patients with recurrent pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to the liver is contraindicated. In fact, I know a couple of transplant surgeons who call such a procedure a murderous waste of a liver, and a life! However, Jobs got a liver transplant in 2009. I strongly suspect that he has very recently received additional cutting edge treatment not widely available.
Cryopreservation/cryonics is likely to creep in on little cat’s feet – with a big jump or two along the way. Cryobanking of parenchymatous organs will probably be one jump, reversible cryopreservation of the brain another, and finally, whole body suspended animation. But it behooves us to beware that lots and lots of people are “calmly” accepting their fates today, who could in fact be ‘rescued’ by already extant medical technology—but for the knowledge, the money and the will. And THAT is what is NOT likely to change. To a surprising degree, people stay alive because it has been made very easy for them to do so. Make it difficult, and you start to see people dropping away.
Cryonics demands a very high passion for and commitment to staying alive, not just because it is currently such a lousy product, but because, to be really credible, it DEMANDS ACTION to improve the odds of its success. Most people are not activists, and what’s more, most people will refuse a chance at more life when you take away the superficial things that they mistake for their person-hood, or identity. And cryonics proposes to do exactly that. There is historical precedent for this. In his incredibly insightful book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, Viktor Frankl noted that the people in the Nazi concentration camps fell into two groups. The first group consisted of the majority of those interned there, and they were people who defined themselves in terms of their social milieu: if you asked them who they were, they would say, “I am a doctor, a lawyer, a mother...” The second group consisted of a small minority of people who thought of themselves as existing completely independent of any label, any role, or any relationship they had with others, or with society.
When you entered a concentration camp, they took away you clothes, your profession, your family and even your name. For most people, that was the equivalent of taking away their very identity, and thus their will to live. As Frankel observed, it was mostly only the people in second, much smaller group, that survived.
It is from that tiny minority in the population as a whole, that cryonics draws it adherents. They are people who want to live, regardless, and who do not define their sense of self on the basis of their jobs, their social interactions, or really, on anything other than a raw, visceral passion to survive. Some find that absolutely terrifying.
Could you clarify this notion of a group of people who exist independently of labels? Perhaps a name that Frankl used to classify them? I have found nothing online about it.
This jives relatively well with one way I classify people. I imagine what would happen if I were to suddenly take them out of their life and drop them in a city across the country without friends or family and less than a grand on their person. I think most people I know would find it incredibly taxing. A relative minority would simply take in their surroundings and start building again.
Frankl didn’t provide a nomenclature. His book was useful to me because it alerted me to what I was (and am), and also offered a reasonable explanation of the nature of so many of the people I found myself involved with in cryonics. Frankl observed that those people who lived independently, not just independently of the labels others put on them, but also of their roles and purpose (internal as well as external) in their social world, had in common a certainty of purpose and meaningfulness in their lives. For Frankl, those things were god and love—principally love for his wife. But this was clearly not the case for many others who survived. Their purpose might best be described as an imperative to always live and grow, and to gain knowledge and experience. A purpose that was rooted in the very nature of their being, or in their experience of reality. For whatever reason, these people understood that there is no universe without me, and that because I know from experience that life can be good, I must continue and pursue more of it. Frankl was not thrilled about this cohort, and he famously remarked, “The best of us did not survive.” Frankl has little to say to me beyond the message that such people exist, that an unshakeable sense of purpose and joy in living is essential to indefinite survival, and that people who draw their purpose and identity from what they do, where they fit into their family or society, or on the basis of their rank or achievements, quickly die when these things are taken away from them. I think that’s quite a lot for being so little of what he otherwise has to say in the book.
You had me until you brought up Frankl. My take on that book was very different than yours apparently was.
I had a reaction of disgust. It seemed to me that between the lines of his writing he was boasting that his camp survival was proof of his intestinal fortitude and it seemed tasteless or tacky of him to be peeing on the graves of millions of victims like he was Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around behind his chariot. If I did not have to read the book for a class I would not have finished it. That was a raw and visceral reaction which was so strong that even today, dozens of years later, I look askance at anybody using Frankl to buttress their arguments.
This is not rational of me. Perhaps I will have another look at Frankl’s book.
That picture of the dinner plate of shit in your first figure—is that a clip art or did you take that yourself?
“The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable.”
What states of mind made such an inane and irrelevant question more probable?
(To answer the question you claim to be asking, use of Tineye would have lead you directly to Wikimedia Commons.)
This was the first time I have seen Darwin’s blog and it ate up much of my afternoon.
I’m glad to hear that; that was one of the goals—to introduce LW to Darwin a bit.
Does Darwin ever post on LessWrong, and if not I would be curious why not?
LW is a very recent thing. Darwin got involved in cryonics in, like, the 1960s. It’s not surprising if, as he began polishing and dumping online what sometimes feels like decades of material, he didn’t do so on some popular new transhumanist website; so there may be nothing there to explain. If there was, it may be that Darwin differs philosophically from LW in general (certainly Yudkowsky has vociferously criticized the excerpted post).
Specifically he has a graph of “cryonics” (the word) citations in all periodicals scanned by google up to February 2011 versus time and it appears the most talked about item in the history of cryonics, ever, may well be Ted Williams’s frozen head. He has a photograph of Williams in his article.
(& also I had never heard of this google ngram thing before and it looks remarkable.)
I have it from a good source that a famous inventor may sign up. (No, not that one.) If he follows through and goes into suspension before I do, I will wear a denim shirt to mark the occasion.
This was the first time I have seen Darwin’s blog and it ate up much of my afternoon. He presents the most impassioned cryonics arguments I have seen. In particular the AIDS activism post is something I could recommend to anybody including die-hard cryonics haters.
Does Darwin ever post on LessWrong, and if not I would be curious why not?
To me the reason conventional wisdom treats cryonics with disdain may be summed up in two cultural memes: 1.) Walt Disney’s frozen head and 2.) Ted Williams’s frozen head. The disdain is like a fashion consensus. I doubt we will live long enough to ever see any public figure’s pro publicity people endorsing a pro-cryonics stance.
Thank you very much for posting this here!
The reason I haven’t posted here before is that I’ve had no burning reason to, and I’m busy.
While there are many discrete reasons why cryonics hasn’t been (more) successful, the single biggest reason is the most obvious one; it has not been demonstrably shown to work. If suspended animation were a demonstrated reality tomorrow, and it was affordable (i.e., not like spaceflight, which is demonstrably workable, but not yet affordable) then the tide would be turned. Even then, it is unlikely there would be any kind of flash-stampede to the freezers.
A schoolmate and friend of mine just died a few weeks ago of pulmonary fibrosis. He was an ideal candidate for a lung transplant. But, he couldn’t afford it, so he just laid there and died. Thousands of people who need transplants die each year, even though it is a proven modality of treatment that is yielding a significant number of quality years of life. But, it is costly, there aren’t enough donors, and here’s the really remarkable thing, the vast majority of people who could benefit from a transplant are never even candidates.
Consider Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway: http://www.rickross.com/reference/amway/amway24.html. In 1983 DeVos, suffering from coronary artery disease, had bypass surgery. In 1992 DeVos had another bypass surgery, and by 1995 it was clear he had end stage congestive heart failure (CHF). How many people have you known or heard about who fit that description, and subsequently go on to die a perfectly pedestrian death; at home or in the ICU? Such deaths are so routine no one gives them a second thought.
And it’s for damn sure that no one gives them a second thought when the patient is a 71 year old man! However, if you are absolutely fixated on staying alive, and your net worth is well in excess of 2 billion 1997 dollars, well, the rules of the game are different for you. DeVos got his heart in London, and the Amway corporate jet flew him there from Grand Rapids, MI. That was in 1997, and as far as I know, DeVos is still alive. There are countless ~71 year old men in the US, and elsewhere in the Developed World, dying of CHF right now. In those cases, the word “transplant” is neither uttered nor heard – even though it is very much a reality that if you have the money, the persistence and the luck – a heart transplant offers the prospect of another 5 years of reasonably good quality life, on average.
I worked in hospital, mostly in critical care medicine, for 7 years. The overwhelming majority of patients are passive – they do what their physicians advise and if they do have alternative ideas, they are usually easily dissuaded from pursuing them. And, truth to tell, most of the “alternative ideas” patients have are bad ones, including Steve Jobs. But, if you are smart, lucky and rich – and you come to your senses, as Jobs did, it can be whole other ball game. Jobs suffered recurrent pancreatic cancer (islet cell neuroendocrine tumor) after a Whipple procedure in 2004. That is just about as close as you can get to a death sentence, since the usual location of the met(s) is the liver. It is current medical consensus that liver transplantation in patients with recurrent pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to the liver is contraindicated. In fact, I know a couple of transplant surgeons who call such a procedure a murderous waste of a liver, and a life! However, Jobs got a liver transplant in 2009. I strongly suspect that he has very recently received additional cutting edge treatment not widely available.
Cryopreservation/cryonics is likely to creep in on little cat’s feet – with a big jump or two along the way. Cryobanking of parenchymatous organs will probably be one jump, reversible cryopreservation of the brain another, and finally, whole body suspended animation. But it behooves us to beware that lots and lots of people are “calmly” accepting their fates today, who could in fact be ‘rescued’ by already extant medical technology—but for the knowledge, the money and the will. And THAT is what is NOT likely to change. To a surprising degree, people stay alive because it has been made very easy for them to do so. Make it difficult, and you start to see people dropping away.
Cryonics demands a very high passion for and commitment to staying alive, not just because it is currently such a lousy product, but because, to be really credible, it DEMANDS ACTION to improve the odds of its success. Most people are not activists, and what’s more, most people will refuse a chance at more life when you take away the superficial things that they mistake for their person-hood, or identity. And cryonics proposes to do exactly that. There is historical precedent for this. In his incredibly insightful book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, Viktor Frankl noted that the people in the Nazi concentration camps fell into two groups. The first group consisted of the majority of those interned there, and they were people who defined themselves in terms of their social milieu: if you asked them who they were, they would say, “I am a doctor, a lawyer, a mother...” The second group consisted of a small minority of people who thought of themselves as existing completely independent of any label, any role, or any relationship they had with others, or with society.
When you entered a concentration camp, they took away you clothes, your profession, your family and even your name. For most people, that was the equivalent of taking away their very identity, and thus their will to live. As Frankel observed, it was mostly only the people in second, much smaller group, that survived.
It is from that tiny minority in the population as a whole, that cryonics draws it adherents. They are people who want to live, regardless, and who do not define their sense of self on the basis of their jobs, their social interactions, or really, on anything other than a raw, visceral passion to survive. Some find that absolutely terrifying.
Could you clarify this notion of a group of people who exist independently of labels? Perhaps a name that Frankl used to classify them? I have found nothing online about it.
This jives relatively well with one way I classify people. I imagine what would happen if I were to suddenly take them out of their life and drop them in a city across the country without friends or family and less than a grand on their person. I think most people I know would find it incredibly taxing. A relative minority would simply take in their surroundings and start building again.
Frankl didn’t provide a nomenclature. His book was useful to me because it alerted me to what I was (and am), and also offered a reasonable explanation of the nature of so many of the people I found myself involved with in cryonics. Frankl observed that those people who lived independently, not just independently of the labels others put on them, but also of their roles and purpose (internal as well as external) in their social world, had in common a certainty of purpose and meaningfulness in their lives. For Frankl, those things were god and love—principally love for his wife. But this was clearly not the case for many others who survived. Their purpose might best be described as an imperative to always live and grow, and to gain knowledge and experience. A purpose that was rooted in the very nature of their being, or in their experience of reality. For whatever reason, these people understood that there is no universe without me, and that because I know from experience that life can be good, I must continue and pursue more of it. Frankl was not thrilled about this cohort, and he famously remarked, “The best of us did not survive.” Frankl has little to say to me beyond the message that such people exist, that an unshakeable sense of purpose and joy in living is essential to indefinite survival, and that people who draw their purpose and identity from what they do, where they fit into their family or society, or on the basis of their rank or achievements, quickly die when these things are taken away from them. I think that’s quite a lot for being so little of what he otherwise has to say in the book.
There have been studies of resilient people.
You had me until you brought up Frankl. My take on that book was very different than yours apparently was.
I had a reaction of disgust. It seemed to me that between the lines of his writing he was boasting that his camp survival was proof of his intestinal fortitude and it seemed tasteless or tacky of him to be peeing on the graves of millions of victims like he was Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around behind his chariot. If I did not have to read the book for a class I would not have finished it. That was a raw and visceral reaction which was so strong that even today, dozens of years later, I look askance at anybody using Frankl to buttress their arguments.
This is not rational of me. Perhaps I will have another look at Frankl’s book.
That picture of the dinner plate of shit in your first figure—is that a clip art or did you take that yourself?
To quote Quirrel,
What states of mind made such an inane and irrelevant question more probable?
(To answer the question you claim to be asking, use of Tineye would have lead you directly to Wikimedia Commons.)
I’m glad to hear that; that was one of the goals—to introduce LW to Darwin a bit.
LW is a very recent thing. Darwin got involved in cryonics in, like, the 1960s. It’s not surprising if, as he began polishing and dumping online what sometimes feels like decades of material, he didn’t do so on some popular new transhumanist website; so there may be nothing there to explain. If there was, it may be that Darwin differs philosophically from LW in general (certainly Yudkowsky has vociferously criticized the excerpted post).
& then I found this on Darwin’s site:
google ngram research on cryonics
Specifically he has a graph of “cryonics” (the word) citations in all periodicals scanned by google up to February 2011 versus time and it appears the most talked about item in the history of cryonics, ever, may well be Ted Williams’s frozen head. He has a photograph of Williams in his article.
(& also I had never heard of this google ngram thing before and it looks remarkable.)
Yeah, N-gram can give some interesting insights. I used it for anime the other week.
I have it from a good source that a famous inventor may sign up. (No, not that one.) If he follows through and goes into suspension before I do, I will wear a denim shirt to mark the occasion.
I’m not sure who you mean.
A search on “denim shirt” inventor eventually yields this.
I’m not even sure what he means.