7 replies to this topic

[thefirstimmortal]

Eric Drexler suggested, in a talk at the 1985 Lake Tahoe Life Extension
Festival, that evolution selected against people (and cultures) that wasted
time on something they could do nothing about. Therefore, most people do not
think (seriously) about defeating death. (Note: Drexler's argument is not just
about genetic evolution but also, and especially, memetic evolution in our
culture.)

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 3225
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 01:02:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <cp@panix.com>
Subject: CRYONICS:Reasons not to sign up


There is really no mystery about people's reluctance to sign up for
cryonic suspension, and it troubles me when cryonicists sometimes seem
exasperated, unsympathetic, or downright disgusted by people who opt for
mortality. Elitism always bothers me. Too often it is a sign of closed
mindedness (exactly the sin which we ascribe to non-cryonicists).

Here are some typical (and in the subjective sense, valid) reasons why
people don't sign up:

1. Most people have religious faith which provides reassurance.
2. Most people are to some extent afraid of the future.
3. Many people do not trust current medicine, let alone future medicine.
4. Many people feel their first obligation toward their families, and
would feel guilty about spending money on life insurance for themselves.
5. Most people are preoccupied with the short term rather than long term.
6. Cryonics may seem a form of wasteful self-indulgence.
7. Cryonics is likely to seem wacky. "If my business associates ever
find out about this, my career will go down the tubes."
8. Cryonics organizations are small and relatively under funded.
9. Cryonics is unregulated, untested, unproven.
10. Cryonics groups are staffed by activists or underpaid employees, many of
whom have no professional qualifications or business experience.
11. No human being or mammal has ever been revived after 100% freezing.
12. Orthodox scientists mostly laugh at cryonics.
13. There is no guarantee that people in the future will defrost anyone.
14. Signing for cryonics entails the most painful acknowledgment of one's
own mortality.
15. Cryonics sign-up paperwork tends to be overwhelmingly complex and
full of worrisome disclaimers of liability.
16. Some cryonics patients were allowed to thaw in the past.
17. There is no known way, as yet, to prevent or repair freezing damage.
18. The idea that life processes can be arrested and restarted is a gross
violation of most people's instinctive ideas on the subject.
19. Anyone who dies in an accident is likely to be autopsied, which will
probably include dissection of the brain.
20. If you allow yourself to believe that cryonics has a chance of working,
you have to reconsider many fundamental aspects of your life.

I could go on, but you get the general idea. There are, in conventional
terms, excellent reasons for ignoring cryonics. Our task should be to
acknowledge those reasons and understand the feelings that are associated
with them, as a preliminary process before trying to "convert" anyone. If
you don't show some sympathy toward a potential client's point of view,
you probably won't succeed in selling him anything. And since cryonics
should always be a freely chosen option, the "hard sell" approach is out
of the question.

Naturally, I believe there are good answers to all the points I have
listed above, otherwise I would not have signed up, and I would not be
trying to promote cryonics. But I still respect other people's points of
view.

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4274
Date: 22 Apr 95 16:31:33 EDT
From: Saul Kent <71043.1120@compuserve.com>
Subject: Reaching People

I think we need to focus
on the specific reason(s) that make prospects reluctant to sign up. We
know (generally) what those reasons are. In many cases, a prospect
fails to sign up for only one of them. What we need to do is to
identify the reason keeping a particular prospect from signing up and
address it specifically. This is the most direct and fruitful method of
overcoming barriers to commitment. What follows is a list of some of
the reasons that keep people from signing up and some ideas about how
to deal with them.

1. I CAN'T AFFORD TO SIGN UP. If the person saying this is
young and in good health, you can suggest inexpensive term life
insurance. If the person is older and in poorer health, you can suggest
methods other than insurance, such as equity in a house or other
non-liquid asset. Such prospects should also be told about *all* the
cryonics organizations they can sign up with. If they want whole-body
cryopreservation, for example, they may be able to afford signing up
with CI, but not with the other cryonics organizations.

2. I'M YOUNG AND HEALTHY...I'LL SIGN UP LATER WHEN I NEED
CRYONICS MORE. The obvious argument here is that even young and
healthy people die. However, I think a more effective argument is
that, by signing up now, and supporting the program, you will improve
your chances of having access to better cryonics services in the
future, when you need them. Again, this argument works better if you
can produced *evidence* of this in the present.

3. CRYONICS IS TOO FAR OUT...IT'S NOT RESPECTABLE ENOUGH. One
argument against this, of course, is that it's not very respectable to
be dead, however many people, especially those in high places, value
respectively more than the risk of being dead forever. I think a better
approach with such people is first to have them meet some *very*
respectable solid citizens who are signed up for cryonics and then to
persuade them that, if they wish, their membership can and will be held
confidential.

4. CRYONICS ORGANIZATIONS ARE TOO SMALL AND TOO WEAK...I DON'T
HAVE ENOUGH CONFIDENCE IN THEIR LONG-TERM SURVIVAL. The obvious argu-
ment is that the only way cryonics organizations can grow is if people
like *you* sign up. Another approach is to emphasize the *quality* of
the people in the organization in order to convince the skeptic that
the organizations are, in fact, more solid than they appear.

5. CURRENT CRYONICS METHODS ARE TOO POOR...I DON'T THINK MY
CHANCES OF SURVIVAL ARE HIGH ENOUGH TO WARRANT SIGNING UP. The argu-
ments here are that *some* chance is better than none, that methods are
improving, and that future repair technologies are likely to be better
than you think.

6. MY RELATIVES ARE AGAINST IT. Confidentiality isn't a good
argument here because it is important for relatives to know that you've
signed up, unless the concern of the relatives is to keep *others* from
knowing about it. I believe the best approach here is to get the
prospect to persuade his or her relatives to read cryonics literature
and to meet cryonics members, preferably at a social event. If this
happens, relatives are likely to come around eventually.

7. I'M RELIGIOUS. I BELIEVE IN AN AFTERLIFE. WHY SHOULD I SIGN
UP? The reason is that "heaven can wait"...just because you think
you're going to survive *after* death doesn't mean that you should
necessarily be in a rush to die. The best approach here is to find
someone already signed up who also believes in an afterlife, preferably
with the same religious background, to explain to the prospect why he
or she signed up.

There is something else I'd like to see to give us (as a movement) the
best chance of signing people up. Sometimes a prospect will sign up
with one cryonics organization, but not with another for a variety of
reasons such as the cost of signing up, the size of the organization,
the technical abilities of the organization, their financial resources,
or the people that he or she interacts with. That being the case, I'd
like to see every prospect informed about the existence of *every*
cryonics organizations from the beginning. What I'd also like to see is
cryonics organizations offering their leads to other organizations
*after* they've done their best to sign them up. I believe it's better
to have people signed up with competing organizations than to have them
not signed up at all. To persuade organizations to do this, perhaps
some form of compensation can be agreed upon if one organization gives
another a lead who, eventually, signs up with that organization.

Saul Kent

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4420
Date: 19 May 95 13:52:02 EDT
From: "Kent, Saul" <71043.1120@compuserve.com>
Subject: Recruitment

I think there are quite a few people out there who are strongly
interested in cryonics, but who have not, for one reason or another,
signed up yet. These are the people who we should spend most of our time
with. I think this time should be focused on the specific reasons they
have not signed up yet, which are, in most cases, I believe,
identifiable.

Signing up for cryonics is a major decision that
people often put off for years, but once they make up their mind, they
are usually in there for the duration.

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4496
From: Ettinger@aol.com
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 1995 23:42:25 -0400
Subject: giving

Just signing up is a leap of courage and imagination of
which only a tiny minority have yet been capable. Of course I agree that
additional commitment might well yield hugely disproportionate rewards--but
we don't know that for sure, and at the margin we can't really brand anyone
as weak or short-sighted.

Certainly I agree that more of us should do more and give more. And it NEED
NOT feel like sacrifice! It can feel like pride and adventure and excitement
and achievement. Maybe we should give each other more medals and plaques.
(Seriously)

How many in cryonics--of above average means--have contributed a serious
portion of their money, either before or after death? Maybe Dave Pizer, Saul
Kent, Bill Faloon, Dick Jones, Jack Erfurt, Fred Sherrill...I've probably
missed a few, but the list isn't very long. Those who have contributed
generously in work comprise a longer list, but still very few.

[advancedatheist]

I suspect the collapse of belief in the "better future" we were promised has something to do with the lack of interest in cryonics. I was struck by the contrast between the positive or at least neutral reaction to the false urban legend of Walt Disney's cryonic suspension versus the generally negative response to Ted Williams's real cryonic suspension. Disney died in 1968, as I recall, when the U.S. was experiencing rapid economic growth and much cultural and social experimentation. The country was troubled in ways hard to imagine now by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and other events operating at the time, but simultaneously Americans had realistic expectations of getting and staying employed with net increases in purchasing power year after year. The Apollo program was also engaging the imaginations of many young Americans and gave the decade a "futuristic" optimism about scientific and technological progress that we seem to have lost. Ettinger's proposal for freezing dying people to take advantage of such progress in the future fit well into that decade's zeitgeist. So when the false meme about Walt Disney began to propagate, most people seemed comfortable with the idea that he was residing in a cryogenic dewar somewhere until the wave of progress sweeping over the country at the time was up to the task of resuscitating him. That's why, for example, I'm not aware of anyone who has ever demanded that if Disney is frozen, he be thawed out and given a "christian burial."

So, why in the early 21st Century are so many of the people who admired Ted Williams upset by the fact that he got cryosuspended for real? The public squabble between his two sets of offspring has something to do with it, but I would argue that the growing dysfunctions in our society form the backstory to the negative reaction. In many respects progress has stalled since the 1970's, and people no longer have the sense that advancing technology will make their lives "better," at least not on the same magnitude that occurred between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970's.

Consider the concept of "future shock," for example. Alvin Toffler introduced this idea in a book of that title published in 1970 to describe the discomfiture experienced by many Americans who had grown up before the Second World War and by the late 1960's had found themselves in a social and material environment that was radically different from what they knew in their youth. My father, for example, who was born in 1927, grew up before antibiotics, space travel, nuclear power, the Pill, computers, knowledge of the structure and function of DNA and other such "modern" commonplaces had entered the world. He didn't see his first television broadcast until he was well into his 20's.

I, by contrast, was born in 1959, and all these things have been part of the background as far back as I can remember. I find myself in my 40's seeing a world that hasn't changed all that much since my teens in the 1970's, and indeed with many of the same problems we didn't solve properly back then but merely postponed to the "long run," like oil depletion. (Guess what: We're living in the "long run" the country's leaders in the 1970's discounted because they figured they would either be dead by now, or else too old to care. So much for standard economic "rationality" among death-destined humans.) I don't feel "future shock" in the least, in other words, which tells me that the rate of the sort of progress that matters has fundamentally decelerated.

No doubt other people feel similarly, though without articulating exactly how or why. And I suspect their implicit skepticism about the "better future" through science and technology accounts for much of their rejection of cryonics.

[thefirstimmortal]

X-Message-Number: 4725
Date: 06 Aug 95 11:12:59 EDT
From: "Kent, Saul" <71043.1120@compuserve.com>
Subject: Survival

I agree with Thomas Donaldson that cryonics has "a chance" of
surviving. I also think that today's patients have "a chance" of
surviving. But "a chance" of surviving doesn't satisfy me. I'm looking
the "best possible chance" of surviving!
I got into cryonics in 1965 at the age of 25. Today I'm 56. In
the past 31 years, there has been some progress in cryonics as well as in
aging research, but the prognosis for me personally is worse today than
it was in 1965.
As a result, I have very little patience for those who "argue"
about the future of cryonics, aging control, uploading, and other
possible means of extending lifespan. I think all these things and more
are likely to occur, but my primary interest is the possibility of *my*
continued occurrence in the future.
For me, the only question that really matters is whether I will
benefit from future advances in life extension. The only meaningful
answer I've ever found to that question is that the more I do personally
to further progress in life extension, the better my chance of survival
is likely to be.
As a result, I'm much more interested in what's being *done* than
what's being *said*, unless you're talking about what you've done!

---Saul Kent