I see they left this part of the Ted Williams story out..
"PHOENIX -- A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams' remains, alleges the Baseball Hall of Famer's body was mistreated by the company.
Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose."
"MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of whom boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. "
Consider a few things. Acting a collective fashion is extremely powerful. It could be eminently rational to sacrifice a few incidental personal goals in order to join a collective which can achieve some of your larger ones. Another thing to consider: I think, in general, the arrow is moving away from monolithic collectives and towards smaller, overlapping, more individualistic, identities because of the internet. This has had a lot of effects on society, one of which is to make smaller collectives seem louder and more powerful. Before, culture was so monolithic that alternative views had to be pretty widely shared or violently asserted to make a splash.
he wrote that the leadership in the Arab–Israeli conflict had failed, and that the warring sides were "acting like adolescents, refuse to resolve their wasteful 25-year-old brawl"
Until it runs out of money, that is. Reanimation is nowhere near viable but this facility will have to do something to keep those bodies frozen...or else.
Six months ago this would have been sarcasm but now, no. This is an extremely good point given what happened. I am still baffled how the janitor did that, could do that, knew to do that, and was even in a position to unplug.
I thought the whole idea of Alcor was premised on their spending money from their clients not solely on equipment and technology, but also in long term investments designed to pay out the operating costs eventually; is that not the case?
> This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science-fiction, and it’s naive
Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This, on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing.
Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html, I agree with most of his points, except "No one ever will ever ever want to live forever". Because everyone actually does want to live forever, they're just afraid to openly acknowledge it.
But all of these people are already actually truly dead, with their physical body not existing much more than the mummified remains you sometimes find in other places. The fact that they're frozen rather than dessicated is irrelevant - frozen mamallian bodies are completely dead.
That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
> Hypothermic cardiac arrest has high mortality and few known prognostic factors. We studied retrospectively 34 victims of accidental hypothermia with cardiac arrest admitted to The University Hospital of North Norway during 1985-2013 who were resuscitated and rewarmed by extracorporeal circulation. No patient survived prior to 1999, while nine out of 24 (37.5%) survived hypothermic cardiac arrest from 1999 to 2013. The lowest measured core temperature among survivors was 13.7°C; the longest time from cardiac arrest to return of spontaneous circulation was 6 h and 52 min. The only predictor of survival identified was lower blood potassium concentration in the nine survivors compared with the non-survivors. Submersion was not associated with reduced survival. Non-survivors consumed modest hospital resources. Most survivors had a favourable neurological outcome.
Can't find the very cool journalistic story where I learned the phrase a few years ago. I think it was one of those New York Times online features they used to do. Similar to the famous Avalanche story, but about a woman who froze to death and came back ... or maybe it was part of the Avalanche story even. Memory fuzzy
> not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
Recovering text from charred fragments of paper is sometimes possible, but anything reduced to ash is lost forever. The information required to reconstruct it ends up dispersed across the whole state of the Earth, and from there leaks out into space at the speed of light: it can never be recovered, even in principle.
The same is true vis a vis corpsicles and corpses. Whether cryopreservation preserves enough structure to make resurrection possible is an open question, but once your synapses are gone they're gone for good.
The bodies are still relatively intact physically. The point of the freezing is to stop any possible chemical activity so that no decomposition or other harmful change happens and the information contained in the body stays intact.
> That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
You're saying that like you know exactly what a consciousness is, what's its physical representation and what is enough to support it. Our best understanding is that the brain itself contains enough information to encode one's "self". It might be in the neuron connections or something else — that part we aren't sure about yet.
Imagine going through all the trouble to get yourself frozen, only to wake up 200 years later in some post-apocalyptic cannibal's stew pot. Boy would that be embarrassing.
And then you go all mad max beyond thunder done, finally reaching California and then realizing it was just a local apocalypse. Everyone else made it to utopia.
No part of our planet is going to stay close to 77K without a staggering amount of effort.
Arizona is seismically stable, a low flood risk, and has abundant solar power. It's probably not a terrible choice. Mix in laxer regulations than you'd see in California, and an innate hucksterism? It's a great fit!
If they’re already having to deal with fractured organs[1], then I have to ask what’s the point given that an organ can probably handle far greater damage than the brain.
Whilst the dreamer in me would like to believe that all this is possible in the future, I’m not convinced that todays technology is enough to even “freeze” the body, thawing and reanimation be damned.
Readit News
"PHOENIX -- A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams' remains, alleges the Baseball Hall of Famer's body was mistreated by the company.
Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose."
https://www.espn.com/boston/mlb/news/story?id=4524957
[Edit]
Also, Niven's "A World out of Time" [1], where the reanimated ('corpsicles') are used for menial / dangerous tasks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
It's truly scary, but there is of course also the potential of eternal life in paradise.
JFC indeed.
~ Lena Forsén
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
Can't help but think his desire to leave behind collective identities has been crushed recently.
All we seem to do these days is reinforce collective identities and vie to join and exclude particular groups and people.
he wrote that the leadership in the Arab–Israeli conflict had failed, and that the warring sides were "acting like adolescents, refuse to resolve their wasteful 25-year-old brawl"
Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This, on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing.
Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html, I agree with most of his points, except "No one ever will ever ever want to live forever". Because everyone actually does want to live forever, they're just afraid to openly acknowledge it.
That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
So fun fact: In mountain rescue they have a saying that you aren't dead until you're warm and dead. People do come back from frozen.
Here's some science about this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24882104/
> Hypothermic cardiac arrest has high mortality and few known prognostic factors. We studied retrospectively 34 victims of accidental hypothermia with cardiac arrest admitted to The University Hospital of North Norway during 1985-2013 who were resuscitated and rewarmed by extracorporeal circulation. No patient survived prior to 1999, while nine out of 24 (37.5%) survived hypothermic cardiac arrest from 1999 to 2013. The lowest measured core temperature among survivors was 13.7°C; the longest time from cardiac arrest to return of spontaneous circulation was 6 h and 52 min. The only predictor of survival identified was lower blood potassium concentration in the nine survivors compared with the non-survivors. Submersion was not associated with reduced survival. Non-survivors consumed modest hospital resources. Most survivors had a favourable neurological outcome.
Can't find the very cool journalistic story where I learned the phrase a few years ago. I think it was one of those New York Times online features they used to do. Similar to the famous Avalanche story, but about a woman who froze to death and came back ... or maybe it was part of the Avalanche story even. Memory fuzzy
Recovering text from charred fragments of paper is sometimes possible, but anything reduced to ash is lost forever. The information required to reconstruct it ends up dispersed across the whole state of the Earth, and from there leaks out into space at the speed of light: it can never be recovered, even in principle.
The same is true vis a vis corpsicles and corpses. Whether cryopreservation preserves enough structure to make resurrection possible is an open question, but once your synapses are gone they're gone for good.
According to what criteria?
The bodies are still relatively intact physically. The point of the freezing is to stop any possible chemical activity so that no decomposition or other harmful change happens and the information contained in the body stays intact.
> That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
You're saying that like you know exactly what a consciousness is, what's its physical representation and what is enough to support it. Our best understanding is that the brain itself contains enough information to encode one's "self". It might be in the neuron connections or something else — that part we aren't sure about yet.
Arizona is seismically stable, a low flood risk, and has abundant solar power. It's probably not a terrible choice. Mix in laxer regulations than you'd see in California, and an innate hucksterism? It's a great fit!
But Arizona is definitely the kind of place where this type of scam is profitable. Until the maintenance bills come.
Whilst the dreamer in me would like to believe that all this is possible in the future, I’m not convinced that todays technology is enough to even “freeze” the body, thawing and reanimation be damned.
[1] https://www.alcor.org/library/postmortem-examination-of-thre...