With the bizarre legal wrangle over whether or not Ted Williams really wanted to have is body cryonically frozen, Alcor and other cryonics comapnies and advocates were suddenly in the news. Does cryonics represent anything but a Quioxitic effort to cheat death?
I doubt it. I suppose if you’re wealthy enough and don’t mind the idea of havingt your body forzen in liquid nitrogen it might not be an unreasonable idea. After all, the odds of science being able to someday revive cryoncially frozen people is certainly a positive number — but, I suspect, a ridiculously low positive number.
The main problem I see with cryonics is that I don’t want my body to survive, but rather I want me to survive — to make cryonics worthwhile, I would want my consciousness, memories, etc. to be preserved.
But most cryonics advocates seem to have a horribly reductivist view of human consciousness. Certainly consciousness is a biological phenomenon, but cryonics seems to presuppose that it is also an incredibly mechanisitic phenomenon that can be stopped at one state and started decades later like some sort of extremely complex clock.
When looking at what is currently known about how the brain works, however, the evidence seems to be overwhelming that consciousness is largely a process.
Source:
Cryonics: Freezing for the future? The BBC, July 18, 2002.