I agree with the premises and find them very interesting. It's something to keep in mind when debriefing an introduction to cryonics to someone new.
However, I think the proposed solution doesn't suit me — though that doesn't mean it's bad. I would probably put people off more if I approached them this way. It feels somewhat dishonest; after all, we're trying to reframe the concept of death into something reversible — and not just in words. It feels like setting myself up for an unavoidable semantic debate with no good outcome. Either I concede and appear confused, or I stand firm and look like I'm in denial.
I don’t feel that the "death" framing is as off-putting as the article suggests. I rarely encounter negative reactions — people are usually intrigued, curious, even fascinated. I think some were genuinely interested; maybe a handful will eventually sign up. For most, the idea of reversible death is unfamiliar. But I believe the door has been unlocked. And we can thank science fiction for making sure that door existed in the first place, which weakens the "iron horse" argument. Back then, there weren’t many words for alien concepts. AI was once purely a sci-fi notion, and now everyone and their grandmother uses the term, even if what we have isn’t quite what science fiction promised (at least not yet).
It feels like trying to hack your way out of a problem by sidestepping into another. I don’t think I can pull it off, but I’d be really interested to see someone else succeed.
Interesting idea for reframing. For some reason cryosleep doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe we could just use the word stasis or biostasis like we started to.
First, the terms stasis and biostasis are too difficult to grasp for non-cryonicists who are completely unfamiliar with our way of thinking. These are technical, science-derived terms that aren’t intuitively accessible to the general public.
Second, the way Max proposes using his new term cryosleep makes complete sense in the minds of the general public. Of course, we need to proceed gradually—for example, introducing the idea of neuro-suspension only well after people are familiar with the concept of cryosleep.
Using the term cryosleep along with Max Marty’s full explanation seems like the best way to start teaching this idea to people.
Of course, that’s just my point of view, not yours—but I’d really like to understand why you don’t like this new term.
Max correctly points out the process is not like sleep. It’s like calling an automobile a horseless carriage as an example which sounds ridiculous now but back then maybe it made sense to people. I don’t think people have an issue with the term or wording they have an issue with the concept itself while people back then probably would have been ok with the concept of a horseless carriage. The concept of cryonics is very complex and changing the wording won’t change that.
I completely agree, but that’s exactly what Max is trying to address with his concept of Cryosleep. Yes, the concept of cryotransport is generally difficult for people to grasp, but if instead of starting to talk about it using the word cryonics, we used cryosleep, it would change a lot of things subconsciously in people’s minds.
Of course, we’re going to develop the concept further and gradually introduce increasingly complex topics such as theoretical information death, clinical death, neuropreservation, and nanomachines — but we’ll do it gently and progressively.
What Max is trying to tell us here is that we need to rethink the way we present cryonics to the general public, without shocking or pushing people too hard. Maybe if we present it as a kind of synaptic sleep, people will be more open and less hostile at first — especially on a subconscious level.
And maybe if everyone started presenting the subject the way Max does, through the lens of cryosleep, the number of sensationalist media articles portraying us as transhumanist necrophile zealots would begin to decrease, and the number of members joining cryosleep organizations would steadily grow.
After all, it’s through small efforts that we can change everything — even something that seems insignificant could end up having enormous consequences, don’t you think?
Personally, I’ve made the choice to use the word cryosleep as much as possible.
Max Marty has provided us with a thought-provoking article about reframing how we as a community present cryonics / biostasis to the general public. He provides a correct (imo) analysis that "freezing dead people" is simply a non-starter and an immediate visceral sense of "YUCK" to the majority of humans, even the well-educated, broadly read demographic that is our current niche.
I will be doing a presentation at the National Space Society next week, and I will be incorporating "CRYO-SLEEP" in this and future communications about cryonics. The concerns expressed in the comments are legitimate; most of us are SUPER careful to not use euphemisms or marketing concepts which may be interpreted as non-precise or technically inaccurate.
BUT PEOPLE ARE PERMANENTLY DYING BY THE MILLIONS because we have not yet managed to package the memeset of cryopreservation in a way that is more broadly accepted.
Max, you've convinced me. We must "CHANGE AND CHARGE" until we find the emotional approach that resonates, and we can add to the "CRYOSLEEP" concept to our future discussions.
I just finished reading Max’s excellent article—it's perfectly written and highly engaging. I hadn't thought about it before, but I realized that whenever I talked about cryonics with my friends and family, I always got very negative reactions. Most of the conversations would go something like this:
“Come on Syd, this is totally morbid—why freeze completely dead corpses?”
“Because they’re not dead—they’re patients, not corpses.”
“You can’t call severed and frozen heads ‘patients.’ They’re dead.”
“The information isn’t dead. You know, there are brilliant nanotech experts who believe that tiny machines could one day analyze your synaptic proteins and reconstruct your consciousness.”
“It’s a morbid and necrophilic industry!”
“… (Forget it)”
Anyway… all that to say: it’s really difficult to explain to people that our patients truly are patients—not “corpses.”
We don’t want to bring a 70-year-old Ralph Merkle out of cryosleep only for him to look like a damaged zombie. That’s not what we’re aiming for as statists.
And yet… that’s exactly what most people think our goals are.
Thanks to Max Marty’s wonderful article, everything is much clearer to me now. I’m going to start using the term cryosleep as much as possible in my conversations and public communication—especially on social media, like Instagram.
Until today, I was used to using the term cryotransport, and I presented cryonics as an attempt to preserve someone indefinitely after cardiac arrest (at least until technologies like nanotech can enable resurrection).
Now that I’ve read Max’s article, I’m going to do my part in supporting the collective effort he’s proposing.
A huge thank-you to Max Marty for this exceptionally well-written article!
Interesting thoughts, Max. I will ponder them. I have long tried to avoid the death trigger and association by never saying "death" on its own but always modified as "clinical/legal" death and by explaining why biostasis patients are not dead. I think it also helps to frame biostasis as an extension of emergency medicine.
My concern with framing the state of biostasis as sleep is that people will worry about having bad dreams for decades! I know you suggest modifying the concept of sleep to exclude dreaming but I doubt that is easier than modifying or clarifying the concept of death.
Why not compare biostasis to a coma? It is basically an ametabolic coma. "CryoComa."
Great article, and important topic! In my experience, it's sometimes fun to use phrases like "come back from the death" because it perks people's ears up. To certain types of individuals it can sound edgy and cool, and I can crack jokes with them about "Yeah I'm going to be a zombie one day!" before I can tell them that it's actually a very serious scientific endeavor. It's all about knowing your audience though, and I can definitely see how the sleep framing with work with maybe more old-fashioned, more "vanilla" type individuals :)
Back in high school (circa 1977), my English teacher at the time said something to the effect that every generation thinks it invented sex, because young people by definition lack the time horizon that comes with adult life experience and the study of history.
I was reminded of this insight when I read the relatively young Max Marty's essay about the need to reframe cryonics around avoiding the D-word, because he writes like he thinks he just came up with the idea, when cryonicists have been discussing this problem for decades now. For example, Brian Wowk wrote about it back in 1988:
But then the younger generation of cryonicists in general is remarkably incurious about cryonics' history, even though a lot of it is readily accessible online and they could benefit from studying it.
And the flip side of finding a workaround to the D-word is the idea that we have to avoid using the I-word as well to describe cryonicists' goal, even though the foundational text for cryonics, by Robert Ettinger, is titled "The Prospect of Immortality." For a long time one of the periodicals published by Ettinger's organizations was titled "The Immortalist," but now simply "Long Life," apparently because we don't want to say the quiet part out loud now, I guess. It shows vastly scaled-back ambitions when cryonicists, at least when communicating with mainstream people, have to say that we want to live merely longer rather than live "forever," whatever that could mean.
Hi Max. I didn't mean to criticize you for being unfamiliar with old cryonics literature. I'm sorry that it came off that way. I was expressing frustration that the problem you identified is still a problem, and that the field of cryonics still sometimes shoots itself in the foot by insufficiently emphasizing that the purpose of cryonics is to prevent people from dying. The purpose of cryonics is to stop the process of dying until better technology can make a proper determination of whether a person has really died by the criterion of persistence or inferability of identify-critical brain structure or lack thereof.
Regarding, "We don’t immediately recoil or make specific assumptions when we hear the word “death” - but other people do." Actually, I am one of those other people. :) I do recoil at the word death. I assume when I hear it that it means that a person is GONE, which is a horrible tragic thing. I was and am appalled when I see cryonics described as freezing dead people because freezing dead people is pointless by definition. There should be no need to elaborate on the perception problems of cryonics being seen as an intention to bring dead people back.
Having said that, there is a practical need to communicate with medical, legal, and funeral professionals about cryonics. That's where death with qualifying adjectives comes in, such as clinical death (stopped blood circulation) and legal death (death for legal purposes). There is no avoiding those terms in many important contexts. However they don't embody the key idea of cryonics.
The key idea of cryonics isn't preserving dead people or preserving legally dead people. (Someday cryonics patients might not even be classified as legally dead.) Cryopreservation after legal death is a practical necessity, not a defining characteristic of cryonics. Regardless of what the state of being cryopreserved is called, agreeing that cryonics isn't about preserving dead people is the most important idea that cryonics advocates should agree on. Otherwise I don't know what's really being advocated.
Like so many other details of cryonics, be they matters of science, technology, law, or communications, I was dismayed to see that the ideas expressed by this post had also become lost to cryonics community when they actually have a long history.
It's of course completely correct that human cryopreservation, if it's being successful in its objective, is philosophically a state of coma not death. That idea should never have been forgotten.
Perhaps the next idea that can be rediscovered is that the actual stated objective of cryonics is preservation of brain structures encoding memory and personality for future functional restoration (by any means), with tissue viability as only a surrogate marker for that objective. It's been very strange to see ASC adopt that mantle of legitimacy in the neuroscience community, with cryonics now perceived (and presenting itself?) as some kind of naive functional preservation attempt without regard for what really matters for recovery prognosis. Heck, even ASC was proposed in the context of cryonics 40 years ago.
As a technical quibble, sleep encompasses very specific states of restorative brain activity. In medicine, an electrically inactive brain is a state of coma.
Hi Brian, appreciate your thoughts and feedback. I am sure folks have debated cryonics terminology in the past, but I am much newer to the field and haven’t gone back to read through the full archives, so I hope to whatever extent I am echoing similar ideas you take it as a form of flattery.
As I mentioned in the article, obviously I wouldn’t use the term “cryosleep” in a technical or legal context, but I believe it portrays the central most important idea of cryonics to “normal people” in a way that maximally transmits what we (cryonicists) are trying to achieve and how we think of the cryopreservation process.
You and I are *weird* in the context of cryonics. We don’t immediately recoil or make specific assumptions when we hear the word “death” - but other people do. This article is how I choose to communicate with those normal people, not with “us” weird folks.
Coma is not a bad term to use, but for most people it means something specific and medical not a general term for a particular pattern, the way “sleep” has become.
Was good to see you at the dinner with Ralph after Biostasis at vitalist bay.
Hi Max. I didn't mean to criticize you for being unfamiliar with old cryonics literature. I'm sorry that it came off that way. I was expressing frustration that the problem you identified is still a problem, and that the field of cryonics still sometimes shoots itself in the foot by insufficiently emphasizing that the purpose of cryonics is to prevent people from dying. The purpose of cryonics is to stop the process of dying until better technology can make a proper determination of whether a person has really died by the criterion of persistence or inferability of identify-critical brain structure or lack thereof.
Regarding, "We don’t immediately recoil or make specific assumptions when we hear the word “death” - but other people do." Actually, I am one of those other people. :) I do recoil at the word death. I assume when I hear it that it means that a person is GONE, which is a horrible tragic thing. I was and am appalled when I see cryonics described as freezing dead people because freezing dead people is pointless by definition. There should be no need to elaborate on the perception problems of cryonics being seen as an intention to bring dead people back.
Having said that, there is a practical need to communicate with medical, legal, and funeral professionals about cryonics. That's where death with qualifying adjectives comes in, such as clinical death (stopped blood circulation) and legal death (death for legal purposes). There is no avoiding those terms in many important contexts. However they don't embody the key idea of cryonics.
The key idea of cryonics isn't preserving dead people or preserving legally dead people. (Someday cryonics patients might not even be classified as legally dead.) Cryopreservation after legal death is a practical necessity, not a defining characteristic of cryonics. Regardless of what the state of being cryopreserved is called, agreeing that cryonics isn't about preserving dead people is the most important idea that cryonics advocates should agree on. Otherwise I don't know what's really being advocated.
Re-reading that, it was more negative than I intended. To add something positive and practical, when it's necessary to use the word death in contexts other than intrinsic irreversiblity, I think it's helpful to use qualifying adjectives, such as clinical death and legal death. In contexts where a persuasive lecture isn't called for, those terms can quickly communicate the state of a cryonics patient without any weirdness and yet without ceding any philosophical ground.
BTW, Christians have traditionally referred to death as "sleep." For example, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 (KJV):
51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
My understanding is Christianity (and plenty of other religions) evoke “raised from the dead” imagery quite explicitly. It’s intended to create the sense that their deity has the ultimate power - the power over life and death.
At any rate, that’s why I want to stay away from such language. Cryonics isn’t raising the dead, it’s more akin to a peculiar form of sleep.
We see this disclaimer in the revival scene in the classic science fiction movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Patricia Neal's character asks Klaatu after his revival something to the effect about whether the robot Gort has the power of life and death. Klaatu says, no, only some euphemism for god has that power.
I'd like to remake this scene using AI, where Klaatu says something like, "Of course Gort has that power, foolish Earth woman. What do you think 'life' is - some kind of MIRACLE?"
I agree with the premises and find them very interesting. It's something to keep in mind when debriefing an introduction to cryonics to someone new.
However, I think the proposed solution doesn't suit me — though that doesn't mean it's bad. I would probably put people off more if I approached them this way. It feels somewhat dishonest; after all, we're trying to reframe the concept of death into something reversible — and not just in words. It feels like setting myself up for an unavoidable semantic debate with no good outcome. Either I concede and appear confused, or I stand firm and look like I'm in denial.
I don’t feel that the "death" framing is as off-putting as the article suggests. I rarely encounter negative reactions — people are usually intrigued, curious, even fascinated. I think some were genuinely interested; maybe a handful will eventually sign up. For most, the idea of reversible death is unfamiliar. But I believe the door has been unlocked. And we can thank science fiction for making sure that door existed in the first place, which weakens the "iron horse" argument. Back then, there weren’t many words for alien concepts. AI was once purely a sci-fi notion, and now everyone and their grandmother uses the term, even if what we have isn’t quite what science fiction promised (at least not yet).
It feels like trying to hack your way out of a problem by sidestepping into another. I don’t think I can pull it off, but I’d be really interested to see someone else succeed.
Interesting idea for reframing. For some reason cryosleep doesn’t appeal to me. Maybe we could just use the word stasis or biostasis like we started to.
I disagree with you, Carrie, and here’s why.
First, the terms stasis and biostasis are too difficult to grasp for non-cryonicists who are completely unfamiliar with our way of thinking. These are technical, science-derived terms that aren’t intuitively accessible to the general public.
Second, the way Max proposes using his new term cryosleep makes complete sense in the minds of the general public. Of course, we need to proceed gradually—for example, introducing the idea of neuro-suspension only well after people are familiar with the concept of cryosleep.
Using the term cryosleep along with Max Marty’s full explanation seems like the best way to start teaching this idea to people.
Of course, that’s just my point of view, not yours—but I’d really like to understand why you don’t like this new term.
Max correctly points out the process is not like sleep. It’s like calling an automobile a horseless carriage as an example which sounds ridiculous now but back then maybe it made sense to people. I don’t think people have an issue with the term or wording they have an issue with the concept itself while people back then probably would have been ok with the concept of a horseless carriage. The concept of cryonics is very complex and changing the wording won’t change that.
I completely agree, but that’s exactly what Max is trying to address with his concept of Cryosleep. Yes, the concept of cryotransport is generally difficult for people to grasp, but if instead of starting to talk about it using the word cryonics, we used cryosleep, it would change a lot of things subconsciously in people’s minds.
Of course, we’re going to develop the concept further and gradually introduce increasingly complex topics such as theoretical information death, clinical death, neuropreservation, and nanomachines — but we’ll do it gently and progressively.
What Max is trying to tell us here is that we need to rethink the way we present cryonics to the general public, without shocking or pushing people too hard. Maybe if we present it as a kind of synaptic sleep, people will be more open and less hostile at first — especially on a subconscious level.
And maybe if everyone started presenting the subject the way Max does, through the lens of cryosleep, the number of sensationalist media articles portraying us as transhumanist necrophile zealots would begin to decrease, and the number of members joining cryosleep organizations would steadily grow.
After all, it’s through small efforts that we can change everything — even something that seems insignificant could end up having enormous consequences, don’t you think?
Personally, I’ve made the choice to use the word cryosleep as much as possible.
Max Marty has provided us with a thought-provoking article about reframing how we as a community present cryonics / biostasis to the general public. He provides a correct (imo) analysis that "freezing dead people" is simply a non-starter and an immediate visceral sense of "YUCK" to the majority of humans, even the well-educated, broadly read demographic that is our current niche.
I will be doing a presentation at the National Space Society next week, and I will be incorporating "CRYO-SLEEP" in this and future communications about cryonics. The concerns expressed in the comments are legitimate; most of us are SUPER careful to not use euphemisms or marketing concepts which may be interpreted as non-precise or technically inaccurate.
BUT PEOPLE ARE PERMANENTLY DYING BY THE MILLIONS because we have not yet managed to package the memeset of cryopreservation in a way that is more broadly accepted.
Max, you've convinced me. We must "CHANGE AND CHARGE" until we find the emotional approach that resonates, and we can add to the "CRYOSLEEP" concept to our future discussions.
Rudi Hoffman CFP
I just finished reading Max’s excellent article—it's perfectly written and highly engaging. I hadn't thought about it before, but I realized that whenever I talked about cryonics with my friends and family, I always got very negative reactions. Most of the conversations would go something like this:
“Come on Syd, this is totally morbid—why freeze completely dead corpses?”
“Because they’re not dead—they’re patients, not corpses.”
“You can’t call severed and frozen heads ‘patients.’ They’re dead.”
“The information isn’t dead. You know, there are brilliant nanotech experts who believe that tiny machines could one day analyze your synaptic proteins and reconstruct your consciousness.”
“It’s a morbid and necrophilic industry!”
“… (Forget it)”
Anyway… all that to say: it’s really difficult to explain to people that our patients truly are patients—not “corpses.”
We don’t want to bring a 70-year-old Ralph Merkle out of cryosleep only for him to look like a damaged zombie. That’s not what we’re aiming for as statists.
And yet… that’s exactly what most people think our goals are.
Thanks to Max Marty’s wonderful article, everything is much clearer to me now. I’m going to start using the term cryosleep as much as possible in my conversations and public communication—especially on social media, like Instagram.
Until today, I was used to using the term cryotransport, and I presented cryonics as an attempt to preserve someone indefinitely after cardiac arrest (at least until technologies like nanotech can enable resurrection).
Now that I’ve read Max’s article, I’m going to do my part in supporting the collective effort he’s proposing.
A huge thank-you to Max Marty for this exceptionally well-written article!
Interesting thoughts, Max. I will ponder them. I have long tried to avoid the death trigger and association by never saying "death" on its own but always modified as "clinical/legal" death and by explaining why biostasis patients are not dead. I think it also helps to frame biostasis as an extension of emergency medicine.
My concern with framing the state of biostasis as sleep is that people will worry about having bad dreams for decades! I know you suggest modifying the concept of sleep to exclude dreaming but I doubt that is easier than modifying or clarifying the concept of death.
Why not compare biostasis to a coma? It is basically an ametabolic coma. "CryoComa."
Great article, and important topic! In my experience, it's sometimes fun to use phrases like "come back from the death" because it perks people's ears up. To certain types of individuals it can sound edgy and cool, and I can crack jokes with them about "Yeah I'm going to be a zombie one day!" before I can tell them that it's actually a very serious scientific endeavor. It's all about knowing your audience though, and I can definitely see how the sleep framing with work with maybe more old-fashioned, more "vanilla" type individuals :)
Back in high school (circa 1977), my English teacher at the time said something to the effect that every generation thinks it invented sex, because young people by definition lack the time horizon that comes with adult life experience and the study of history.
I was reminded of this insight when I read the relatively young Max Marty's essay about the need to reframe cryonics around avoiding the D-word, because he writes like he thinks he just came up with the idea, when cryonicists have been discussing this problem for decades now. For example, Brian Wowk wrote about it back in 1988:
The Death of Death in Cryonics
https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/death-of-death/
But then the younger generation of cryonicists in general is remarkably incurious about cryonics' history, even though a lot of it is readily accessible online and they could benefit from studying it.
And the flip side of finding a workaround to the D-word is the idea that we have to avoid using the I-word as well to describe cryonicists' goal, even though the foundational text for cryonics, by Robert Ettinger, is titled "The Prospect of Immortality." For a long time one of the periodicals published by Ettinger's organizations was titled "The Immortalist," but now simply "Long Life," apparently because we don't want to say the quiet part out loud now, I guess. It shows vastly scaled-back ambitions when cryonicists, at least when communicating with mainstream people, have to say that we want to live merely longer rather than live "forever," whatever that could mean.
Hi Max. I didn't mean to criticize you for being unfamiliar with old cryonics literature. I'm sorry that it came off that way. I was expressing frustration that the problem you identified is still a problem, and that the field of cryonics still sometimes shoots itself in the foot by insufficiently emphasizing that the purpose of cryonics is to prevent people from dying. The purpose of cryonics is to stop the process of dying until better technology can make a proper determination of whether a person has really died by the criterion of persistence or inferability of identify-critical brain structure or lack thereof.
Regarding, "We don’t immediately recoil or make specific assumptions when we hear the word “death” - but other people do." Actually, I am one of those other people. :) I do recoil at the word death. I assume when I hear it that it means that a person is GONE, which is a horrible tragic thing. I was and am appalled when I see cryonics described as freezing dead people because freezing dead people is pointless by definition. There should be no need to elaborate on the perception problems of cryonics being seen as an intention to bring dead people back.
Having said that, there is a practical need to communicate with medical, legal, and funeral professionals about cryonics. That's where death with qualifying adjectives comes in, such as clinical death (stopped blood circulation) and legal death (death for legal purposes). There is no avoiding those terms in many important contexts. However they don't embody the key idea of cryonics.
The key idea of cryonics isn't preserving dead people or preserving legally dead people. (Someday cryonics patients might not even be classified as legally dead.) Cryopreservation after legal death is a practical necessity, not a defining characteristic of cryonics. Regardless of what the state of being cryopreserved is called, agreeing that cryonics isn't about preserving dead people is the most important idea that cryonics advocates should agree on. Otherwise I don't know what's really being advocated.
Like so many other details of cryonics, be they matters of science, technology, law, or communications, I was dismayed to see that the ideas expressed by this post had also become lost to cryonics community when they actually have a long history.
https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/death-of-death/
It's of course completely correct that human cryopreservation, if it's being successful in its objective, is philosophically a state of coma not death. That idea should never have been forgotten.
Perhaps the next idea that can be rediscovered is that the actual stated objective of cryonics is preservation of brain structures encoding memory and personality for future functional restoration (by any means), with tissue viability as only a surrogate marker for that objective. It's been very strange to see ASC adopt that mantle of legitimacy in the neuroscience community, with cryonics now perceived (and presenting itself?) as some kind of naive functional preservation attempt without regard for what really matters for recovery prognosis. Heck, even ASC was proposed in the context of cryonics 40 years ago.
As a technical quibble, sleep encompasses very specific states of restorative brain activity. In medicine, an electrically inactive brain is a state of coma.
Hi Brian, appreciate your thoughts and feedback. I am sure folks have debated cryonics terminology in the past, but I am much newer to the field and haven’t gone back to read through the full archives, so I hope to whatever extent I am echoing similar ideas you take it as a form of flattery.
As I mentioned in the article, obviously I wouldn’t use the term “cryosleep” in a technical or legal context, but I believe it portrays the central most important idea of cryonics to “normal people” in a way that maximally transmits what we (cryonicists) are trying to achieve and how we think of the cryopreservation process.
You and I are *weird* in the context of cryonics. We don’t immediately recoil or make specific assumptions when we hear the word “death” - but other people do. This article is how I choose to communicate with those normal people, not with “us” weird folks.
Coma is not a bad term to use, but for most people it means something specific and medical not a general term for a particular pattern, the way “sleep” has become.
Was good to see you at the dinner with Ralph after Biostasis at vitalist bay.
Hi Max. I didn't mean to criticize you for being unfamiliar with old cryonics literature. I'm sorry that it came off that way. I was expressing frustration that the problem you identified is still a problem, and that the field of cryonics still sometimes shoots itself in the foot by insufficiently emphasizing that the purpose of cryonics is to prevent people from dying. The purpose of cryonics is to stop the process of dying until better technology can make a proper determination of whether a person has really died by the criterion of persistence or inferability of identify-critical brain structure or lack thereof.
Regarding, "We don’t immediately recoil or make specific assumptions when we hear the word “death” - but other people do." Actually, I am one of those other people. :) I do recoil at the word death. I assume when I hear it that it means that a person is GONE, which is a horrible tragic thing. I was and am appalled when I see cryonics described as freezing dead people because freezing dead people is pointless by definition. There should be no need to elaborate on the perception problems of cryonics being seen as an intention to bring dead people back.
Having said that, there is a practical need to communicate with medical, legal, and funeral professionals about cryonics. That's where death with qualifying adjectives comes in, such as clinical death (stopped blood circulation) and legal death (death for legal purposes). There is no avoiding those terms in many important contexts. However they don't embody the key idea of cryonics.
The key idea of cryonics isn't preserving dead people or preserving legally dead people. (Someday cryonics patients might not even be classified as legally dead.) Cryopreservation after legal death is a practical necessity, not a defining characteristic of cryonics. Regardless of what the state of being cryopreserved is called, agreeing that cryonics isn't about preserving dead people is the most important idea that cryonics advocates should agree on. Otherwise I don't know what's really being advocated.
Well said, agree on all counts.
Re-reading that, it was more negative than I intended. To add something positive and practical, when it's necessary to use the word death in contexts other than intrinsic irreversiblity, I think it's helpful to use qualifying adjectives, such as clinical death and legal death. In contexts where a persuasive lecture isn't called for, those terms can quickly communicate the state of a cryonics patient without any weirdness and yet without ceding any philosophical ground.
I've always thought of it as suspended living while your damaged organs are either repaired or replaced.
Uh, Max, you're starting to sound like Unperson.
BTW, Christians have traditionally referred to death as "sleep." For example, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 (KJV):
51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
My understanding is Christianity (and plenty of other religions) evoke “raised from the dead” imagery quite explicitly. It’s intended to create the sense that their deity has the ultimate power - the power over life and death.
At any rate, that’s why I want to stay away from such language. Cryonics isn’t raising the dead, it’s more akin to a peculiar form of sleep.
We see this disclaimer in the revival scene in the classic science fiction movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Patricia Neal's character asks Klaatu after his revival something to the effect about whether the robot Gort has the power of life and death. Klaatu says, no, only some euphemism for god has that power.
I'd like to remake this scene using AI, where Klaatu says something like, "Of course Gort has that power, foolish Earth woman. What do you think 'life' is - some kind of MIRACLE?"