I was just doing some searching, and I saw the link back on page 14 in this topic about Hal Finney being cryopreserved.
No disrespect to Hal, but I think that cryopreservation is a load of SHIT.
No one who is cryopreserved will ever be revived. The body simply does not work that way.
Each one of us, me, you, etc... WE are not the physical "we" that we see and feel in and of our physical human bodies. WE are the life energy, the "soul", as it is, and we merely inhabit these human bodies for the length of this bodies' lifespan. It is like living in a house that is freshly built when this body is born, and then over time the house decays and collapses, equivalent to the death of this human body.
So the actual Hal Finney is gone, probably onto his next life already, never to return to the long dead human body, or "house" he once lived in.
People have died-- no respiration, no heartbeat, and no brain activity for reasonably long spans of time--... under special circumstances of low temperatures and low oxygenation (which limited apoptosis) and survived.
Even under your mystical interpretation of life which is unsupported by scientific inquiry-- how could you have any idea how long someone must be dead before their soul "energy" couldn't return? Why should time even have meaning to soul energy?
And if it does someday become possible to recover people preserved today, every one of us that didn't support it vigorously will-- in hindsight-- be part of the largest scale mass murder ever... perhaps billions of lives that could be preserved, ignored, because some people had a hunch about soul 'energy' and what not.
The main thing I dislike about many religious and spiritual advocates isn't their unfounded beliefs-- knowledge has limits, currently for sure, and perhaps forever, I see no harm in dreaming about the gaps in between the things we know-- but, rather, the profound lack of imagination and the level of certainty in their ignorance.
If, in spite of all objective observation, "we" aren't these beautiful machines whos operations exists squarely in the somewhat known physical laws of the universe; but are instead some kind of ineffable soul energy unconstrained by normal physical law that would make it observable... Then why the heck should we expect that energy need to obey time? causality? distance? entropy? or otherwise behave like a physical thing, since you've already decided that it isn't one. No one has yet attempted to restore a cryopreserved person with a result that "should have worked" and yet found it didn't, and the closet we have (some freak accidents) suggests that people _can_ miraculously be revived if the meat machinery is in good enough shape. And the technology of cryopreservation, even if it can never be applied to whole people, is essential science that could eventually transform emergency medical treatment, organ transplants, and many other things.
I don't think this argument does anything to debase your view of an ineffable soul-- if anything it glorifies it: a soul that can transcend time and space to be returned back to the right place when summoned by the collective, careful, brilliant, and loving work of mans finest minds in the culmination of generations of study of the wonders of nature all around us... I think that kind of soul is a lot more grand that one that cares about "before" and "after", loses its attention, and goes elsewhere or fizzles out.
And I wonder, if some hundreds of years from now Hal will read this thread and feel sadness for each of us that didn't make it.
But especially for people who aren't popsicles now, there is no reason to be sad-- there is reason to work. As far as anyone knows a all forms of death from natural causes are curable and only ignorance, fear, and insufficiently audacious romanticism prevent us, collectively as mankind, from solving it--
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.htmlMany people with old money are constrained by perverted social dynamics from funding research to fight death at a fundamental level-- the vision of some billionaire trying to live forever is so reflexively distasteful to people that they often won't fund it, even though the science might eventually save trillions of lives. I hope that more people who've gained wealth through Bitcoin will have the courage (or at least the ego) to buck that trend-- and I think we do, since I know at least six long time bitcoiners who fund relevant research.
Put another way, maybe you're right and Hal and no one else could ever be restored this way. So what? Many wealthy people already have funerals far more expensive than cryopreservation. And those funerals don't have even the tinyest chance of helping them come back in the future. Being cryopreseved wouldn't have any effect on your soul if they exist... but if works, it might just bring you back.
Or, in other words:
"So the possibility [...] may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of [...] succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about..."
Assuming you think the possibility of living for hundreds of years in the future is very valuable for you or those you love, a long shot bet on that would be a pretty good pay-off.
If you don't think it's at least worth considering, then you fail the test that would have defined you as a very early user of Bitcoin if you'd noticed that you had the opportunity.
I suppose, given how few people thought Bitcoin's long shot was interesting back when Bitcoin was worth nothing, I shouldn't be surprised that many dismiss ideas like this out of hand.
Perhaps something more to think about... Maybe some of of you who missed out in Bitcoin in 2009/2010 won't also miss out on a vastly extended lifespan?
When the brain is deprived of oxygenated blood it dies very quickly.
Certainly not my area of expertise, but the techniques used for cryopreservation are quite remarkable. For small amounts of tissue the damage is negligible to non-existent which is part of why it's perfectly reasonable to keep human embryos cryogenically preserved for a decade (or more!), not just possible but widely done! The results on larger organs are less successful due to issues with evenness and speed, both in the preservation and recovery. But you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the serious work here, no one argues that this stuff is even _likely_ to work with the state of technology right now-- but it's far from the absolutely impossibility that has been argued here.
Not to mention the indirect effects: I would sure prefer to live in a world where many people believed they needed to care for it to preserve it for themselves into the far future, than with people who expect to just vanish or go to some prefabricated paradise even if they make a mess of the place here.