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FREETED
Apologies rrmoderator, this guy has taunted me for years. If you choose to delete my last post, I will certainly understand.
Thanks

I don't think I've ever even met you, Mr. Johnson. Just because I've drawn attention to things you've posted on the internet doesn't mean I've "taunted" you.

The Anticult, I think that the "science" of cryogenics has the burden of proof upon it. They claim that "in the future, new technology will bring you back". Wow. I can't imagine anything more awful. Just think, resurrected 200 years from now. Talk about being a stranger in a strange land. The civilized man/woman today is merely a primative in the rapid technology the present (and future) would bring.

Repeat after me: "I am not an animal!" as you run from the gawkers at the science sideshow you now live in.

No. The burden of proof is on cryogenics. Freeze a mouse (or other mammal) and then bring it back to life. If you cannot do this to prove your "science" then the attorney generals of the states your freeze tanks are in should move to shut cryogenics down as a vicious scam against the naive. ("Gentle Wind Project" anyone?)

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The Anticult
But at this point, Cryonics is simply a religious belief around death, no different than any other religion. It says..."someday in the future we will be bodily resurrected somehow".
Is their any evidence that cryonics works?
Where are the successful results with animal testing? Mammal testing?
Why not just freeze some cells for cloning? (etc).

First of all, you sound confused about the definition of religion. I don't know of any religion which predicted progress in science and trying to extend our lives through scientific means.

Secondly, cryonicists have at least tried to apply some scientific and engineering rationality to the problem of survival, which has more of a basis in reality than all the terror management fantasies people generate about self esteem, ethnic superiority or the afterlife.

Thirdly, cryonicists acknowledge not only that we need to make progress in doing better suspensions, but also as a society in developing the technology to resuscitate cryonics patients. We can demonstrate progress in the first area in "real time," through successful vitrification and revival of the brain. The second area remains iffy at this time, especially if our technologically progressive civilization falters.

Fourthly, "Why not just freeze some cells for cloning?" Surely you know better than that about the brain.

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AdvancedAtheist also claims that according to...
"Ray Kurzweil in "The Singularity is Near," I coined the word "singularitarian"".
So the AdvancedAtheist has an iron in the fire, in that he is claiming to have coined the term Singularitarian. [en.wikipedia.org]
There are some connections to the old Extropians as well.

I don't say that I agree with Kurzweil's singularity religion just because I apparently came up with the name Kurzweil has applied to himself. Greek-speaking pagans who took notice of the early Jesus religion apparently coined the word "Christians" to describe these new cultists, a term which Jesus' follower later applied to themselves.

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But it does appear that a closed-loop cultish mindset has developed around cryonics. Combine that with large estates being handed over in people's wills, secrecy, anti-science, and philosophical fanaticism, and that is a recipe for serious trouble.

What you call "secrecy," others might call "confidentiality." Would you want your physicians, attorneys, psychotherapists or accountants to blab everything they know about your affairs?

As for the "rich cryonicists' estates" distraction, most cryonicists have arranged to pay for their suspensions through life insurance, as I have. Perhaps you feel envious of people who have a much higher net worth than yours?

As for "anti-science," if the way cryonicists performs suspensions doesn't look right scientifically, tell us how to do it better based on your scientific, technological or medical expertise. I will certainly listen to you and even take notes. A clinical perfusionist named Melody Maxim has offered the sort of criticism of cryonics I can respect.

As for "philosophical fanaticism," why do you have a problem with people who value life (the most important thing we know about) and want to do something to try to preserve it? I don't agree with conservative Catholics about much, but I think they have a point about how secular skeptical modernity has embraced a "culture of death," though in my opinion they don't put the emphasis on the right area.

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Sparky
The Anticult, I think that the "science" of cryogenics has the burden of proof upon it.

Look up the correct terminology first.

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They claim that "in the future, new technology will bring you back". Wow. I can't imagine anything more awful. Just think, resurrected 200 years from now. Talk about being a stranger in a strange land. The civilized man/woman today is merely a primative in the rapid technology the present (and future) would bring.

Plenty of people who have lost everything they had and everyone they knew because of a war, natural disaster or the misfortune of living in a country with an abusive government have migrated to more benign countries like the U.S., learned a new language and customs, gotten jobs, started businesses, found spouses and reared new families. In fact, we tend to admire such people.

Consider the situation of the Hmong refugees from Laos, for example. When the U.S. government let them into our country, they did the equivalent of traveling centuries into the future compared with they way they lived before. Many of the older Hmong have had trouble adapting, certainly, but they probably prefer seeing their children and grandchildren grow up in a strange land and speak an unfamiliar tongue than not watch them live at all. Cryonauts would find themselves in an analogous situation, but the future society would probably have better resources to help us adapt.

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No. The burden of proof is on cryogenics. Freeze a mouse (or other mammal) and then bring it back to life.

To see the state of the science from about three years ago, watch this video.

[video.google.com]

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If you cannot do this to prove your "science" then the attorney generals of the states your freeze tanks are in should move to shut cryogenics down as a vicious scam against the naive.

You've just generated an arbitrary stereotype based on no data. Introduce me to these "naive" cryonicists you've met. I bet they live next door to the mythical guy who has made a fortune from cryonics.

I swear, AC, you and I must be longlost twins or something. Thanks for all the great research into such important topics. I think as time goes by you will see even more interconnecting threads between things you research.

Here's a great blog post from Nicholas Carr's "RoughType". If Alcor were just some totally fringe group, it wouldn't be such a big deal. What makes it so creepy is that it has connections to really powerful people!

I would post the text, but I think it is important to go the blog and check out the links as well.


"it kind of looks like the New Age wing of the military-industrial complex "

[www.roughtype.com]

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FREETED
Mr advancedatheist says: “Don't sound so self-important, Mr. Johnson.”


Don’t worry about how I sound, Mr. advancedatheist (aka Mark Plus), General Manager of the Creekside Preserve in Mayer Arizona.

To all of my supporters who are following this thread. To get an idea of the type of people we’re dealing with; please view Mr. Plus (advancedatheist) on his youtube page. Of course when Mr. Plus discovers that I have posted this video, he will immediately delete it, which will only prove that he (like many of his kind) has an awful lot to hide.

[www.youtube.com]

I posted this video to tweak and waste the time of the white supremacists cranks who've tried to revive the worship of the Norse gods. I have a very low opinion of white racists (an issue totally unrelated to cryonics), especially after one of their heroes, Timothy McVeigh, murdered my aunt Frances Williams in the Murrah Building.

In fact, I made this post before I knew you would bring up my YouTube video.

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Mark, you need to crawl back to Cold Filter where you belong before I bring up your involvement with a certain individual. You remember the Henson/Scientology incident, don't you? You know exactly what I mean.

No, I don't, Mr. Johnson.

Warning to whom it may concern:

Please stay focused on the topic of this thread, which is "Cryonics, Cult Movement or Ligit Science???"

Personal bickering is off topic and not meaningful.

Last warning.

Hi, folks...

I was directed to this thread from a post over at Cold Filter. I'm the moderator over there. Yes, I'm an advocate of cryonics as well, but cryonics isn't my god or my religion. I don't have faith in it. I view it as a potentially life-saving technology which is still in its early experimental phase. To me, it's worth being a test subject, a guinea pig, simply because it beats the currently available alternatives. Let me also add that I agree that there should be some sort of regulation, but that it should not be done from the perspective that cryonics is a pseudoscience.

Many of the critiques of the science behind cryonics posted in this thread are based on misconceptions or outdated limitations that have been largely overcome by scientific advancement. For instance, the "mushy frozen strawberry" analogy. This may apply to a brain dumped in the freezer, but that has little resemblance to the washout procedure and cool-down process cryonics has used. More importantly, in recent years cryonicists have started using solutions designed to prevent crystalization, or ice formation, which is the primary cause of damage to tissues. In a chemical reaction called vitrification, tissues become glass-like rather than freezing in the conventional sense. Vitrification is now commonly used in organ preservation research.

Good preservation of rat brain tissue has been demonstrated and published in Cryobiology, the abstract is available in PubMed:

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

The main hurdle to overcome is the level of toxicity in these vitrification solutions. Some say that this will be a minor problem by the time revival is feasible, but most cryonicists see it as a major issue. Researchers continue to work on it.

Another objection I saw in this thread was that people resuscitated after total cessation of brain activity would lose their memories or identity. Below are some quotes that suggest that this is misguided. As you'll see, the first one is from a widely used medical textbook:

"We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be totally inactivated by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again. Therefore, secondary memory must result from some actual alterations of the synapses, either physical or chemical." - Page 658, Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur C. Guyton (W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1986).

"Clinical medicine is now able to "turn off" people for more than an hour with no heartbeat or brain activity for certain surgical procedures. Scientists are on the verge of being able to preserve individual organs indefinitely by using a new technology called vitrification. Brain electrical activity has been detected in animals rewarmed after seven years of frozen storage. Could human life be preserved in an arrested state for years or decades instead of hours? The prospects are still distant, but some people are already betting that current preservation technology may be good enough to be reversible in the future. Whether they are correct is a legitimate scientific question."- Brian Wowk PhD. Medical Time Travel, 2004.

"A large dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate, or propofol, a sedative, is usually used to induce the coma. Monitored with an EEG, the brain shows no activity whatever. 'The brain waves go flat,' [Dr.] Mayer said [Columbia U Med Center]. 'Patients look like they're dead. There's no reaction to any pinch, no pupil reaction, nothing.'"- San Diego Union -Tribune, Jan.25,2006.

"Thomas Donaldson says that brain waves of supercooled small animals have been measured, and there are none, even though the animals still have their memories after they are rewarmed. He cites AU Smith, ed. BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF FREEZING AND SUPERCOOLING, London, 1961; article by Aubrey Smith herself, "Revival of mammals from body temperatures below zero", pp. 304-368."- Timothy Freeman, 1 Nov 1998.

Along these lines, another common concern is that--even if someone is plunged immediately into an ice-bath for cooling--there may be a few minutes of warm ischemia or oxygen deprivation leading to global brain death. This isn't the case. Mainstream medicine has broken through the 5 minute brain resuscitation barrier in experimental models going out to 13 minutes of warm cardiac arrest:

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

Cats have been recovered after ONE HOUR of warm cardiac arrest with only loss of hippocampal and striatal tissue:

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

Living neurons have been cultured at 4 hours:

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

8 hours:

[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

The issue has been raised in mainstream medical literature:

[ccforum.com]

Excerpted at:

[www.alcor.org]

Here's a quote from a mainstream medical website:

[nhnscr.org]

"It is quite clear that clinically defined death, which in most states is simply the cessation of cardiac and respiratory activity, does not mean that all of the cells of the body have died. It simply means that the cells required to maintain/sustain life, namely, cardiac muscle cells and diaphragmatic muscle cells no longer function adequately."

Thank you for reading,

Jonathan

Advancedathiest:

I am suggesting that an untried science like cryonics has the great requirement of offering proof of its success. Skeptics need not offer proof against cryonics. Why? "Extraordinary claims (cryonics for example) requires extraordinary evidence". You are a strong supporter of cryonics. This is not a religion (although The Anticult may disagree) so just "having hope" or "believing" is not appropriate in this case. Since no legitimate peer-reviewed science supports cryonics then the burden of proof falls upon the believers. I am more than willing to listen to any peer-reviewed papers that support the validity of human popsicles, however so far as I can see, any tissue frozen in this manner and thawed out turns a burst-cellwall mush.

thx for this info.
Yes, some of the tech uber-billionaires are also into the Singularity, which is the basic idea that humans will re-engineer themselves into superintelligent immortal beings, upload their minds to computers, travel the universe, live forever, etc. Anyone can search Google for...

Singularity AI

Clearly there are some of these folks who would not think twice about actual cloning experiments on humans in secret offshore, and would do basically anything with no regard for "bio-ethics".
Cryonics is just one of many things they are trying to do.

The singularity as an speculative philosophy is one thing, but when you start cutting up human corpses, and trying to clone humans without proper controls, genetic engineering of humans, its really crossing the line.
There is a lot more to this than meets the eye.

But certainly cryonics has to be strictly regulated. Who knows what is in those freezers, with earth-tremors shaking them, power and tech problems. It could be full of shattered shards of frozen flesh.
Isn't the mutilation of human corpses illegal?
How can they get away with it?

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shakti
I swear, AC, you and I must be longlost twins or something. Thanks for all the great research into such important topics. I think as time goes by you will see even more interconnecting threads between things you research.

Here's a great blog post from Nicholas Carr's "RoughType". If Alcor were just some totally fringe group, it wouldn't be such a big deal. What makes it so creepy is that it has connections to really powerful people!

I would post the text, but I think it is important to go the blog and check out the links as well.


"it kind of looks like the New Age wing of the military-industrial complex "

[www.roughtype.com]