Those who choose not to take that option, please remain in your seat—this will be over soon, and you will feel no pain.
Why does this argument strike me as analogous to Pascal's Wager? You can pray for an afterlife, or not. Your choice. Which do you choose?
With cryonics, though, you can be pretty sure that you are not going to be more dead. There is a small probability you will be revived in a dystopian world and regret it. You can never know for sure, but you can at least reason about it and think about the probabilities given what you know about human nature and history and so on.
The traditional afterlife of religion was constructed to obey physics as it was understood at the time.
All that aside, there's zero evidence to believe in an afterlife. With cryonics we in theory understand it, if the brain is just its atoms, then it's quite conceivable that the information might be able to be reconstructed.
I don't see how they are comparable.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/01/29/how-can-y...
Fundamentally this boils down to a pretty simple question: what's the likelihood that cryonics will "pay out"? If your answer is 0.00001%, sure, don't sign up. But if your answer is, say, 2%, then maybe it's worth it.
Cryonics has a large (but still finite) reward. If you think the chances of cryonics are low enough, then it's not worth pursuing.
I can't force myself to believe something, but I can just choose to sign up for Alcor
In my view, cryonics is just a synthetic religion that has been constructed to replace supernatural stuff with technological-sounding stuff. It should appeal to people who have rejected the supernatural but are still afraid of the finality of death.
"You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly." - C.S. Lewis
In this case, the real issue (how likely cryonics patients are to be revived) is replaced with the alleged motives of the debater ("fear of death", although I'd argue that almost everyone is afraid of death; most people would feel fear if a gun was pointed at them).
It's a puzzling situation. I don't think it's possible to prove that cryonics is wrong, because it strikes me as a non-falsifiable proposition.
- If neuroscientists find that long term memory is encoded in something not preserved by cryonics. (Such as pH levels around certain neurons, or some weird quantum phenomena.)
- If small animals such as mice are trained to perform some task, then fail to demonstrate that training after being cryopreserved & revived. This requires technological advances, but not as much as human-level revival.
- If scientists discover a theory of consciousness that precludes its resumption after cryopreservation-like circumstances. (This would also mean that philosophical zombies are possible.)
Some of these may seem like a tall order, but if cryonics doesn't work, then that would tell us something new about biology, physics, and/or the nature of consciousness.
So far, we've seen all the evidence you'd expect to see if cryonics works: Memories are preserved even after cessation or disruption of electrical activity in the brain. Embryos and other tissues are cryopreserved and thawed without problems. Small mammal organs have been successfully cryopreserved and thawed, and remained functional. SEM micrographs of cryopreserved brain tissue show intact structure, including axons and synaptic vesicles. Most of the problems seem to be in the implementation, not the principle itself. (eg: avoiding warm ischemia when people die suddenly)
Wow, nice rhetorical dodge there. No one cares too much if small mammal 'organs' have been successfully cryopreserved and revived because we can replace your kidney and you are still you. Tell me about the small mammal BRAINS that you have cryopreserved and revived with any evidence of retention of memories or prior training. Tell me about any nervous systems at all which you have successfully preserved and revived. Doesn't have to be a mammal, I would settle for an insect. Tell me about those please.
Until you can do this you are just selling another version of snake oil.
Nobody has revived a small mammal brain because unlike kidneys, we don't yet have the technology to transplant brains. Brains are easier to perfuse with cryoprotectant than kidneys, so they tend to be preserved better. Cryoprotectants seem to be tolerated well by neurons. It is currently possible to cryopreserve & thaw rat hippocampal slices while keeping structure intact and over 90% of cells viable: http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf
> Tell me about any nervous systems at all which you have successfully preserved and revived. Doesn't have to be a mammal, I would settle for an insect. Tell me about those please.
People have cryopreserved & thawed nematodes with an 84% survival rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23995406 The cryopreservation of many kinds of insects (usually in larval or embryonic form) is doable as well. Some of these organisms have thousands of neurons.
The whole point of cryonics is to take advantage of the difference in technology required for preservation versus revival. Saying, "Cryonics is snake oil because revival doesn't work yet." is demanding evidence that can't yet exist even in the case that cryonics works.