The American cryocompany "Alcor" released the following statement from one of its "patients":
“With the inevitable end - and cancer spreading through her brain - Kim made the courageous decision to give up food and liquids. Despite this, it took her 11 days for her body to stop functioning.
At about 6 am on Thursday January 17, 2013, Alkor was notified that Kim had stopped breathing. Since Kim's staunch boyfriend and her family had placed Kim just minutes away from Alcor, Director of Medical Response Aaron Drake was able to arrive almost instantly, then Max More arrived, and then two well-trained Alcor volunteers.
As soon as the hospice sister announced her clinical death, we began our standard procedures. Stabilization, transport, surgery and perfusion went smoothly. A more detailed report will be published soon.”
Alexey Turchin writes: “The bald mustachioed homosexual Mike Darwin was able to convince me that cryonics is necessary. Several years ago in Moscow, he told me: "Cryonics has failed." For 50 years, about 200 people were frozen, and several billion died. More people were gnawed by birds on the roofs of the Parsi houses in Bombay - according to the belief of the last descendants of the Zoroastrians, this is how a proper funeral should take place. More people fell off the donkey and died. More people flew into space. But somehow his pessimism was more persuasive than the beautiful promises of the utopians.
Seven months ago, Kim Suozzi wrote on reddit, “Today is my 23rd birthday and most likely the last. I have an aggressive form of glioblastoma. Is there anything important I should try before I die?"
She received 4,171 comments. She was offered a lot: sex, suborbital travel. One comment reminded her that there is cryonics - the practice of freezing people in order to return to life in the future. She knew about it before, but did not refer to herself.
One of the main mysteries of cryonics is its unpopularity. They say cryonics doesn't work. But people do a huge mass of things that they obviously cannot and should not work: they devour homeopathy, prick someone's stem cells, build giant tombstones. They also make obviously more expensive and senseless things - they buy personal yachts, travel to the South Pole, build bunkers in case of a nuclear war. Even considering cryonics as one of the strangest things in a row, it should be more popular. Purely statistically.
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Kim turned to the readers of Reddit with a request to raise the necessary $ 30-50 thousand for brain freezing after death. Note that this is less than is usually asked for the treatment of cancer patients. Of course, they gave her almost nothing - they offered money for parachute jumps. Ultimately, Alcor paid for her cryopreservation himself. Contrary to the illusion, cryonics has always been unprofitable.
I knew about the existence of cryonics since school - and yet I was not a supporter of it. I was afraid of death as an adult and looked for all the ways to protect myself from it - but did not think about cryonics. I learned about the opening of a cryofirm in Russia and still continued to believe that this did not apply to me. And now I have to try to figure out exactly how Mike convinced me. Was it a "direct transfer" of inner confidence, as from one Zen master to another, or did he find a rational argument that could convince me?
Kim chose de facto suicide in order to get the best quality cryopreservation, that is, to die next to the best cryopreservation company in existence and so that her employees could access her body immediately after death. It is believed that cryonics is not possible because ice crystals tear apart brain tissue. But modern cryonics includes a perfusion procedure, when instead of blood, a fluid enriched with glycerin and other substances that prevent the formation of crystals is injected into a newly deceased organism. As a result, the brain and the information in it, encoded in the structures of the synapses, are preserved. Someday this information can be extracted from there, and in principle it is already clear how this can be done, for example, by layer-by-layer brain scanning or brain restoration using nanorobots.
American blogger and economist Robin Hanson develops the theory that a person has two modes of thinking - near and far. In the distant mode, we believe that death is necessary, since overpopulation will threaten humanity. In close mode, we will fight for our lives or feverishly dial the ambulance number. Abstract-theoretical constructions in the long-range mode do not in any way affect the behavior in a real situation when the short-range mode is turned on. A huge number of people who, in words, were supporters of cryonics, died without ever trying to enter into a cryo contract.
I did not take cryonics seriously, because I thought that this is done by weird rich people in America and I would never have enough money to pay for it - but even that I did not think, because for me cryonics was something far away and inaccessible. But I could find out that in the same America it is available to almost anyone through the life insurance system. Perhaps the native of the islands is also thinking about the possibility of calling an ambulance. This is correct in principle, but impossible. And he continues to think so, even when there is already an ambulance on a boat on a neighboring island.
People, when they hear about the possibility of cryonics, start to object. And you, the reader, already have a good objection on the way. All objections have already been repeatedly sorted out, and the very fact that there are objections suggests that the internal antivirus of your mind has decided to block another radical one.
A favorite objection is that no one has been thawed yet. If we already had technologies for restoring damage in cryonics, namely medical nanorobots, then we would not need to freeze, most diseases would be curable. In addition, they perfectly freeze human embryos and non-method worms for tens of years, and some animals can survive for a hundred years in ice. Branches of trees in winter in the cold still remain alive and can bloom in spring.
Another favorite objection is that a person after death will lose his soul and after returning to life will be without a soul. There is immediately a paradox in such pseudo-religious reasoning, since usually the same people claim that the embryo has a soul from the moment of conception, and the fact is that tens of thousands of embryos were frozen and thawed during IVF, and then what happened to their souls? Of course, if there is a soul and God, then God will be able to return the soul to the body brought back to life. Or he is not omnipotent. Or we know in advance everything that he may or may not want to do. Some people were returned to full life four hours after death, when it was accompanied by a sharp chill, for example, when they fell through the ice. Of course, if not the same nerve cells are restored, but by scanning into a computer,then you can raise a howl to heaven on the topic that a computer cannot have consciousness or it will not be the same consciousness - and here there are endless possibilities for scholastic reasoning, the result of which will be that nothing will be done to preserve it at all. I am now writing a book "On Immortality", and there will be a huge chapter about the so-called question "about the identity of copies."
Mike Darwin was able to transfer the problem of cryonics for me from abstraction to reality. From a mention in a book to a project of a specific person. From distant thinking to near. From abstraction to instrument.
But the unpopularity of cryonics remains a mystery to me. One of the reasons here is that this is a funeral ritual that completely excludes the religious and mystical principle. It makes sense to engage in cryonics only by clearly telling yourself that there is no soul, and the personality is information in the brain. Of course, everyone says this in his ear when he applies some chemical to change the state of consciousness - coffee or alcohol at least - because he thereby recognizes that it is chemistry that is the main thing in the work of his personality. But even this explanation is not enough. The same Soviet cremation is also a completely atheistic way of getting rid of bodies.
People are, in a sense, biorobots, under pressure from ideas about what is really normal. Everyone does - and I. We will bury in a Christian way. I do not understand that the original meaning of Christian burial is precisely in the possibility of the physical resurrection of the dead.
Jesus Christ was in his own way a transhumanist. He fought death in word and deed. He raised the dead and promised physical resurrection to all who believe in him. He demonstrated the possibility of this by his own resurrection. The early Christians expected the imminent resurrection of the dead and for this they preserved their bodies, while the Romans cremated the dead. In fact, for this, the coffin was invented as such a capsule for storing the body. The bodies were kept inside the temple under the floor, in greater sanctity and safety. It was only in the 18th century that the French rationalists helped to end this practice by showing that the stench of decaying bodies was the cause of disease. The coffins were sent to the cemeteries.
Already the early church fathers doubted the need to preserve bodies - for if God is omnipotent, then why does he need bodies? The same can be said about cryonics - if a super-strong artificial intelligence is created in the future, it will find a way to resurrect the dead without the help of preserved bodies. One thing only worries: why, if he is so omnipotent, did he not create a time machine and save us from suffering right now?
And such reasoning immediately transfers the problem to a distant mode of thinking, turns it into scholasticism, into an analogy to the question of how many angels fit on a pin and whether God can create a stone that cannot be lifted.
In the meantime, the terminally ill girl refused to drink and eat in order to bring her death closer and get the best quality cryopreservation."