Oct 25, 2018 03:15 AM
https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-f...1829905516
INTRO: Corpse-freezing hasn’t exactly gone mainstream, but most people are now familiar with the concept: you lay out a ton of cash, sign some papers, and spend a couple post-death decades in a cutting-edge meat locker, calmly awaiting the conditions for your eventual revival. Over 300 cold, dead Americans—or dead, cold American brains, depending on which procedure they opted for (whole-body vs. brain-only)—can currently be found in storage facilities across the country. All of them took a gamble—one that was pretty cheap, metaphysically speaking: the worse case scenario here is just continued death.
For the time being, that is also the only scenario. Only time will tell whether these extremely dead optimists will once more, someday, get stuck in traffic, and/or roam an uncanny Singularity-scape with their AI-abetted computer brains. But we can at least start to guess whether—or if—that day will ever come. For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of neuroscientists, bioethicists, cryo advocates and skeptics to get some sense of what will happen to those frozen former consciousness-havers. Honestly it’s not looking good for them just yet—but the future’s main business is to show up the past’s myopia/blinkeredness, so, who knows! (THE EXPERTS WHO WEIGH IN: Dr. Joao Pedro de Magalhaes; Mark Kline; Nick Bostrom; Dennis Kowalski; Cathal O’Connell; Ralph Merkle; Michael Hendricks; Matthew I. Gibson; Simon Woods)
MORE: https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-f...1829905516
INTRO: Corpse-freezing hasn’t exactly gone mainstream, but most people are now familiar with the concept: you lay out a ton of cash, sign some papers, and spend a couple post-death decades in a cutting-edge meat locker, calmly awaiting the conditions for your eventual revival. Over 300 cold, dead Americans—or dead, cold American brains, depending on which procedure they opted for (whole-body vs. brain-only)—can currently be found in storage facilities across the country. All of them took a gamble—one that was pretty cheap, metaphysically speaking: the worse case scenario here is just continued death.
For the time being, that is also the only scenario. Only time will tell whether these extremely dead optimists will once more, someday, get stuck in traffic, and/or roam an uncanny Singularity-scape with their AI-abetted computer brains. But we can at least start to guess whether—or if—that day will ever come. For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of neuroscientists, bioethicists, cryo advocates and skeptics to get some sense of what will happen to those frozen former consciousness-havers. Honestly it’s not looking good for them just yet—but the future’s main business is to show up the past’s myopia/blinkeredness, so, who knows! (THE EXPERTS WHO WEIGH IN: Dr. Joao Pedro de Magalhaes; Mark Kline; Nick Bostrom; Dennis Kowalski; Cathal O’Connell; Ralph Merkle; Michael Hendricks; Matthew I. Gibson; Simon Woods)
MORE: https://gizmodo.com/will-cryogenically-f...1829905516