Accelerating Future

Robert Ettinger, a hero among many transhumanists for fathering the cryonics movement, has been cryopreserved at age 92 in Clinton Township, Michigan. He died on Saturday, July 23.

The Cryonics Institute press release is here. There are a few obituaries online, including one from the Telegraph. Chronopause, a cryonics blog, reviews the history of Ettinger and cryonics.

Ettinger’s 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality and 1972 book Man into Superman inspire many transhumanists to think beyond the “inevitability” of death.

Ben Best was quoted by KurzweilAI.net on the suspension:

“Robert Ettinger deanimated [Saturday] at around 4 p.m. Eastern Time,” said Ben Best, president of the Cryonics Institute. “He was under hospice care and had an ice bath sitting by his bedside. His pronouncement and initiation of cooling was very rapid. The perfusion went well and he is now in the cooling box. Much more later.”

Ettinger’s 1962 book was a turning point in human history. It represented the first time when people acquired the ambition to preserve the fine-grained structure of the human brain at death. Although Ben Franklin had imagined suspended animation centuries earlier, it wasn’t until Ettinger’s 1962 work that the idea became real. Ettinger participated in the first cryonic suspension in 1967.

Ettinger’s first book was republished by Doubleday after it was sent to Isaac Asimov who said that the concept was scientifically sound.

I hope that Ettinger is revived in the not-too-distant future to “taste the wine of centuries unborn”.

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Here’s the website. I’ll be there, come visit.

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Here’s the interview at KurzweilAI.net. He makes a good point about the TV show Fringe and how there are tens of millions of de facto transhumanists even if they don’t label themselves as such.

Congrats to Max on the new job. Cryonics is one of the oldest and most important parts of the transhumanist infrastructure. Sign up today, don’t delay!

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Yesterday was the day (January 12th, 1967) that the first man was frozen, James Bedford. He was a UC Berkeley psychology professor. Bedford is still frozen and is currently at Alcor.

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Here the link at Less Wrong, from Halloween 2010.

A recent book by Larry Johnson, an employee at Alcor for 7 months, has accused Alcor of abusing Ted Williams’ head, and their facilities of being messy, and the people as people ghoulish and cultlike. He even uses the term “Alcorian” to refer to alleged cryonics cult members. As someone following Alcor for almost a decade, I had never heard of that term until Larry Johnson.

Alcor’s response to Larry Johnson’s book:

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation denies the outrageous allegations against it that have appeared in the media this week. Alcor especially denies mistreating the remains of baseball great Ted Williams. Larry Johnson, the ex Alcor staff member who made these allegations, was not employed at Alcor when Williams was cryopreserved. Johnson’s previous attempts to profit from sensational and unfounded allegations against Alcor recently resulted in a Court Order prohibiting him from making further statements about Alcor. “Alcor is actively pursuing litigation regarding these allegations,” says Alcor Executive Director, Jennifer Chapman.

Recalling the few network television media appearances Johnson had around the release of the book, many of the people who interviewed him accused him of just trying to make money off his book. It seemed that even cryonics-suspicious mainstream America wasn’t buying into the book. However, reading some of the comments on the Amazon page, and the high ratings, makes me think differently.

What I don’t understand are all the people criticizing cryonics because it’s allegedly a mess (I haven’t read the book yet so I can’t comment), but they wouldn’t sign up even if it weren’t a mess. How can someone criticize cryonics unless they understand the functionalist premises of the experiment, anyhow? (Cryonics is an experiment because it’s not guaranteed to work, though saying that it’s guaranteed not to work seems premature.)

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Congratulations to Alcor. I am A-2458, and happy to be part of the Alcor community. My total fees to be part of cryonics are less than $1000/year, including membership fees and the cost of life insurance. My life insurance is especially cheap, something like $25/month. The payout is a full $250,000, which is $100,000 more than the minimum level of $150,000 for full body suspension. So, Alcor will actually get a windfall from my metabolic death, if that ever happens.

I find it rather interesting that Alcor received a $7 million bequest, as so few people have gone into cryostasis recently.

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One study described at Time.com claims that many obese people are happy with the way they are. Another study, at PhysOrg, reports that Latinas tend to be fatalistic about cancer:

To assess whether they were fatalistic, women were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “cancer is like a death sentence,” “cancer is God’s punishment,” “illness is a matter of chance,” “there is little that I can do to prevent cancer,” “it does not do any good to try to change the future because the future is in the hands of God.”

The dynamics operating in both cases may be slightly different, but the fatalism is the same. People are often happy with things the way they are because worrying or actually doing something seem like too much trouble, or even theologically presumptuous. Thus, it’s no surprise that many people aren’t interested in cryonics. If you could prove that it worked, that would certainly change people’s attitudes, but until then, we should predict low adoption rates for cryonics. Medical “fatalism” is common to everyone — the question is at which degree one becomes fatalistic. Put another way, everyone has limited time and money to invest in medicine, and everyone has a different threshold at which they care about it. The standard of mainstream acceptability moves towards the direction of more care rather than less over time, which might not always be a good thing, when the interventions aren’t proven to be beneficial.

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Writing in Lightspeed Magazine: “Considering Cryonics”. Benford makes a note of the odd phenomenon whereby sci-fi greats played around with the concept of cryonics in their stories but never actually signed up for it:

Ray Bradbury once told me he was interested in any chance of seeing the future, but when he thought over cryonics, he realized that he would be torn away from everything he loved. What would the future be worth, he asked, without his wife, his children, his friends? No, he told me, wouldn’t take the option at any price.

This is an example of the “neighborhood” argument, which says that mature people are so entwined with their surroundings, people and habits of mind, that to yank them out is a trauma worse than death. One is fond of one’s own era, certainly. But it seems to me that ordinary immigrants from every era have faced similar challenges and managed to adjust and make freer, better lives in their new homes. Just ask your grandparents.

I’ve met quite a few people against cryonics for this reason — anyone in the audience who holds this belief want to expound on their personal feelings about it?

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Eucrio will officially launch on Friday, October 1st.

From the website:

The Company

EUCRIO is an organization that specializes in providing state-of-the-art standby, stabilization, and transport procedures for cryonicists in the European Union. EUCRIO is pleased to assist members of the three main cryonics storage provider organizations.

The People

EUCRIO employs a wide variety of professionals: including physicians, perfusionists, emergency medical technicians, engineers and scientists, throughout the European Union. EUCRIO has staff members ready to intervene across the European Union and all are ready to respond to clients at all times (24 hours a day, 7 days per week).

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To quote Reason, “Signing up for cryonic suspension at the present time is less like buying an invitation to an event, and more like agreeing to help organize an event.” The world cryonics infrastructure is hardly perfect, so to ensure you actually make it into the freezer, all sorts of measures have to be taken. The room for improvement is vast. Initiative must be taken!

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As a cryonicist, it feels good to have some kind of hedge against death, even if it’s not perfect. It’s much better than your hedge against death being a big invisible alpha male in the sky who talks to us in our heads.

For me, it’s easy to fantasize that if I happen to be hit and killed by a truck tomorrow, someone will quickly notice my cryonics necklace, call up Alcor, a heroic field technician will give me a heparin injection (to prevent clotting), quickly whisk me away to a hospital, where I am pronounced dead, packed with ice, and shipped to Scottsdale for an effective cryonic suspension.

However, such a suspension would probably be considered seriously suboptimal. My blood would be clotted and my tissue would be swollen. According to the Alcor FAQ:

Standby is the process in which cryonics personnel are deployed and waiting near the bedside of a patient at serious risk of death. The purpose of Standby and a Standby Team is to take prompt action to restore blood circulation, administer protective medications, and start rapid cooling when the heart stops beating. This is critically important to achieve a good cryopreservation. Alcor attempts to provide Standby when needed to all members in the U.S. and Canada through its Comprehensive Member Standby Program.

One of the most important things is ensuring that the whole process begins before blood begins to clot. Why? Because the circulatory system is used to get the vitrifying agent into the patient’s body, which prevents crystal formation during the cooldown phase. If it’s clotted up, the vitrification process is ruined, and you have to go with what is called a “straight freeze”.

Under Alcor’s somewhat recent (five years old) Comprehensive Member Standby policy, monthly fees for Alcor memberships were increased by just $10.00, giving the member “standby coverage worth $35,000 or more that would otherwise have to be paid during a time of need or through pre-funding.” There is also $5,000 worth of coverage available for relocation assistance to Scottsdale, an opportunity worth taking advantage of if you have any serious doubts about your health.

Because of all the difficulties inherent in cryonics, it is definitely worth pursuing room-temperature neuropreservation, though I’m sure that process would necessitate a fresh brain as well.

Anyway, the message of this is, if you are really sick or in any danger of spontaneous death, be sure to get on Standby right away! I know a few stories of people signed up for cryonics who underwent sub-par (perhaps irrecoverable) cryopreservations because they were too lazy or stubborn to leave their houses and go under closer monitoring.

Your neural-encoded memories turning into a nutritious sludge for microbial growth — don’t let it happen to you! Your brain is not a petri dish, and should not be treated as one, even after metabolism ceases.

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At the ASIM workshop yesterday, there was a talk by Ken Hayworth that discussed the goal of full-brain chemical preservation, most likely to be achieved through some form of plastination. The Brain Preservation Foundation was founded with this in mind.

Sometime in the next decade or so, plastination may become a method of post-deanimation information preservation preferable to cryonics. If so, it seems sensible to include a proviso in cryonics contracts that gives the cryonics company the legal right to plastinate frozen brains, or even heat up brains and plastinate them, if there is a general consensus among the relevant experts that this is better for information preservation over the longer term. Otherwise you could end up storing your neural patterns in an obsolete storage technology.

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Katja is extremely confused about the “hostile wife phenomenon” in cryonics. Who wouldn’t be? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

If you wouldn’t let your body rot in daily life, why would you let it rot just because one or two organs fail? Organ failure is an arbitrary event. It has no metaphysical meaning.

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