Primordial Groove

Your demise is enevitable. Or is it?

Cryotechnology may hold the key to cross the death barrier, but there are numerous issues that need to be overcome to bring someone back from the dead. One of those is remembering who you are. Afterall, it isnt a soul that defines us, it's our memories and how we react to them that defines us (loosely).

Let's say you choose to be crogenically suspended instead of choosing the ultimate final reality, death. 500 years from now, you are revived but, they cannot make the neural connections to allow you to remember anything from your past. This is a minor inconvenience because you, being forward thinking, write down your thoughts in a digital journal of some sort, you record your characteristics on digital video, etc.

What would you want to record to bring back the 'you'? Would it be your family? Your philisophical outlook? Your political views?
Be as detailed as possible because I am thinking of doing this.

Death is final. Crogenics give a small glimmer of hope.

Loren Pechtel

As I see it, there are four possible outcomes of cryogenics:

1) The mind is electrical in nature, with the loss of power of freezing it's wiped.

2) The human race doesn't make it. You eventually thaw when the machinery isn't maintained.

3) Society has no interest in resurrecting you.

4) Success.

I do not think it will involve anything like 500 years. I suspect revival will be possible within 100 years unless it turns out pointless. I also expect the conquering of old age within that time.

Demosthenes

The way most people look at it, either the cryogenics work and you're alive or it doesn't and you're still dead anyway.

From the four possibilites that Loren listed,

number 1 is considered to be somewhat unlikely but it hasn't been ruled out since obviously we haven't revived a cryogenically frozen mammal and we're still far from a comprehensive theory about neural function.

number 2, while rather depressing, there's little that patients can do about it. Depending on who's making them, the future forecasts look either exciting or bleak. Which only serve to underscore that we're extraordinarily poor at predicting the future.

number 3 is perhaps the most pressing. One of the cryogenic organizations, Alcor has taken steps to ensure that reviving patients doesn't depend on the mood of the society. It has established a permanent non-revocable trust for the maintence and eventual resurrection. In other words, the company will revive the patients when the technology becomes possible. As far as I know, the other companies haven't implemented any kind of permanent strategy for reviving their patients in the future other than maintaining the support systems.

number 4... well it speaks for itself, the goal of any aspiring biostasis patient.

Primordial Groove

I guess the questions can be summed up as:

1. Is a small chance of life after death (cryogenics) better than no chance at all?

2. what makes us who we are? What information, other than the english language, would one need to record to get back some semblence of self?
(english in my case because that is the language that my thoughts would be recorded in).

Corwin

You can make the same argument about a computer, and it fails for the same reason. Not all memory has to be dynamic.

In this case, there wouldn't be much reason to come back anyway.

The relevant part of society is under a legal, moral and ethical (as well as self-interested, since Alcor's employees are generally also members...) obligation to do so.

Again, the preferred result.

I'd say that yes, the chance, however slight it may be, (and I'm not convinced it's all that 'slight') is better than no chance at all. I mean let's look at this.... you'd be pretty much gauranteed to come back to a better world. I know I know, it sounds mystical and religious, but think about it....

If it isn't a 'better world....' they won't have the technology needed to bring us back anyway. Any future world that's capable of reviving cryopatients is going to be pretty much by definition 'better.' (By most objective standards.)

Pyrrho

You seem to be forgetting about the possible disadvantages of "success". First, it may be partially successful, without being completely successful. I have heard that freezing causes damage to the tissue of the brain. Maybe you will end up a revived halfwit. Second, you may wake up in a world in which you don't want to live. You have no way of knowing what kind of society you will be living in, and it may be very distasteful to you. Perhaps, you will be in a society dominated by a fundamentalist type of religion that is even worse than Christianity! You really have NO way of knowing whether it will be like that or something else. Not to mention the fact that most or all that is familiar will be gone. You will also probably be unable to fit into society, no matter what it is like, because you won't know how anything is done anymore. Furthermore, even if you are revived, that does not mean that you will then be immortal. You can still be burned alive in a fire or any of many other possibilities.

I personally would rather drink better wine now than spend my money on something that is likely to fail, or, even if successful, may be an even worse failure. Besides, I am not afraid of death. You can only suffer if you are alive.

KoopaFanatic

A couple of sci-fi books come to mind. Frederik Pohl's The World at the End of Time has a protagonist who gets frozen and thawed at least three times, waking up in a different world each time.
Ben Bova's Twice Seven (I think) has a short story in which the Vatican takes over the whole cryogenic industry.
Larry Niven's A World Out of Time covers dystopia pretty well.

Not exactly scholarly works on the subject, but fun reads and thought-provoking.