Friday, December 23, 2005
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What do you want to happen to your body after you die?
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14 comments:
Cryoguy has not defined "death", and judging from the comment, seems to have given the idea no thought. Disregard comment!
No boundlesslife. The problem is that the average cryonicist gives this matter no thought. Cryonicists sometimes live in their own world, oblivious to the negative effects of their words on others. Everytime a cryonicist says they want to be frozen after death, they shoot themslves and the entire field of cryonics in the foot. That cryonics sounds foolish when described as "freezing after death" is an objective fact, as any newspaper story on cryonics will confirm.
Cryonicists need to make clear that the purpose of cryonics is to stop the dying process before people really die. They need to tell the world that medicine is wrong about when people die. Saying you are freezing dead people makes as much sense as human taxidermy.
Still! No intelligible definition of death! So, this discussion... in terms of what cryoguy is saying... means *nothing*! Define death, cryoguy!
The meaning of death-- the meaning cryonicsts should use if they ever expect to be understood --is the definition in Webster's dictionary: "the permanent cessation of all vital functions." If cryonicists believe that vital functions are not permanently ceased, then by definition they believe that person is not dead. If cryonicists believe that cryonics is worth doing on legally dead people, then they are saying they believe those people are not really dead. Saying dead people should be frozen is ridiculous. After 40 years of ridicule, you'd think they'd have learned by now.
Cryoguy
Cryonicists can't freeze people before they die. It's against the law and they'll go to prison. You must change the law and not cryonics.
Mari
Maria, I didn't say cryonics needs to freeze people before *legal death*. I said cryonics needs to freeze people before *real death*, which is sometimes called biological death, or information theoretic death.
Any dictionary will tell you that death, by definition, is a permanent state. Whenever someone who was legally dead wakes up (it happens), medicine does not say they came back from the dead. Medicine says they were not really dead. If cryonics works, then cryonics patients were never really dead. They were never in Heaven, never in Hell, never reincarnated or any of the other things people believe happen after death. BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER REALLY DEAD. They were just unconscious.
Freezing legally dead people is justifiable based on the argument that they are not really dead. Freezing dead people is not justifiable based on any argument. It is foolish by definition.
So please don't say you plan to be frozen after death. If you say you plan to be frozen "when doctors give up", or "when your heart stops", or "when all else fails", you will get a better response. Cryonics is more favorable received when it is seen as a way of keeping people here on this earth, rather than yanking them back from the hereafter. Been there, done that. (Gotten a more favorable reception that is, not the hereafter. ;)
If someone freezes me while I'm still alive in this country, he will be in big trouble.
The law doesn't allow a doctor to vitrify me if I'm still alive. It doesn't matter if I don't have a chance or everything else fails.
I have to be dead in the eyes of the law to be put in a tank.
I would like to be suspended when I'm dying and before I'm dead.
Perhaps the best thing for me to do is to go to Switzerland where euthanasia is legal.
Freezing someone who is legally alive is a problem. Freezing someone who is legally dead, but biologically alive, is done all the time. That is the key idea of cryonics! Have you really never heard cryonics explained this way before?
Rather than telling people that you want to be frozen after death, which is offensive and nonsensical, you tell people that you want to be frozen as soon as possible after your heart stops to keep you alive. Just because the law says you are dead doesn't mean you are really dead. Legally dead people can still be biologically alive.
OK, cryoguy, you win (on this one), with Webster's as the authority. That's a great definition for death, so that we can say that cryonics will work, no matter what, because we will never get to a point where all vital functions cease. All that remains is to categorize "vital functions" as "any manifestations in reality that represents the continued existence of the identity and consciousness of the person frozen, without recourse to mysticism".
Of course, since most people will not be able to relate to this in a coherent way, it may still be more efficient to refer to people after being frozen as being "merely in a state of clinical death and legal death, vs. 'real' death"!
Thanks for defining death in terms of everything you've said!
Really!
boundlesslife
You've almost got it, boundlesslife. However there is no reason to stretch definitions of "vital functions". It's okay for vital functions to stop; this happens in even ordinary medicine with later survival. The key idea of death is *permanent* cessation of vital functions. If you can make a case that the cessation is not permanent, then you have a case that the patient is not really dead.
We shouldn't go around talking about freezing dead people because that's not what cryonics is really all about. We should talk about cryonics as something that's done when contemporary medicine "gives up", "runs out of options", or "relinquishes care", which is all that legal death means anyway.
Right! "permanent" is the word that differentiates it from everything else that we normally think of in terms of the reversibility of (for example) "clinical death".
Perhaps in addition to clinical death, legal death, biological death (potentially reversible by way of molecular repair) and molecular death (potentially reversible by mean of informational reconstruction of the neurological systems), we could have a new category, to be designated "Webster" death, in which one would inevitably encounter the word "permanent".
On the other hand, if we were to create a genetically generic human and instead of embedding a name and social security number, which would give the human the sense of "being somebody", we were to only embed Webster's Dictionary, then when that person awoke, and searched about for some sense of who he (she?) was, all they would be able to come up with would be the word "Webster", so when asked, "Who are you?" they might reply, "I guess I'm Webster! That's the only name that seems to be associated with me!"
In which case, is it not possible that even "Webster death" would have proved to have been reversible? (Not really , of course, because there's always that enigmatic word "permanent" that the original Webster put into the dictionary, that forever taints the word with the illusion of irreversibility... at least, for those who attribute a great deal of importance to what Webster put in the dictionary.
In that light, let's not forget that commonplace usage definitions and dictionary definitions tend to differ. In the end, the dictionary must be revised to "keep up". By continually referring to the reversibility of clinical death, and the extension of this, ultimately, to the recovery of persons placed into cryonic suspension, a time will come at which what is found today in Webster's dictionary will have been changed to reflect future usage, vs. an archaic misconception of what happens when one's heart stops beating.)
boundlesslife
"Webster death" is redundant. That's my whole point. Whenever the word "death" is used by itslef without qualification, it is permanent by definition. If you want to talk about non-permanent death, then you must always add a qualifier like "legal death" or "clinical death".
Cryonicists should never use the word "death" by itself unless they really mean it as a permanent state. No amount of medical advance will ever change the dictionary definition of death as a permanent state because 1) medicine has already decided that whenever a state thought to be death is reversible, they call it something else, and 2) a word for permanent loss will always be needed anyway.
I don't think I have anything else to add, here. Anyone else?
boundlesslife
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