He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:  16 February 2004 World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
An article in a recent New Yorker (19 January 2004) profiled Stephen Valentine, an architect commissioned by the California-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation to design a building that will function for a hundred years. This will house the bodies of Foundation members who have undergone cryonic suspension - a means of preserving the body similar to freezing – in the expectation that they will be revived at a point in the future when medical technology can cure the disease from which they died and / or repair the impact of aging. (Death, by the way, is a relative term. As cryonists – who object to the term “raising the dead” – point out, the brain does not die immediately the heart stops. Vitrification (freezing the body with chemicals rather than water, which would destroy cells) during the window period between heart and brain death allows cryonists to claim that they are preserving people whose brains are alive, although their bodies are not.) The idea of cryonics first emerged in a book by Robert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, published in 1962. Since then, as proponents point out, advances in several pertinent fields have made the idea of vitrifying and “resurrection” more likely. The process itself has become more sophisticated and nanotechnology (working at cell or molecular level), while still in its infancy, is showing promise as a medical technique. And although no human being has been revived after being cryonically frozen, there are instances of individual organs that have been vitrified, unfrozen and returned to full function. And so across the world, but principally in the United States, foundations and facilities have been established to put the principles of cryonics into practice. Hundreds of bodies and heads are currently in cryonic suspension. (Yes, heads. There is controversy in the cryonics world as to whether it is appropriate to preserve heads. The argument in favour is that the head houses the brain and only the brain is essential in maintaining personality. The argument against is that the technology for whole body preservation is little more complicated or expensive than that for head preservation and the psychological shock of being revived either bodiless or connected to a strange body would be too great for most individuals to overcome.) Reading the New Yorker article started me thinking about the motives and lives of those who want to be preserved. I remembered an article in the Los Angeles Weekly several years ago, profiling a cryonist who spent his life avoiding any kind of even slightly dangerous activity. I forget the details, but the image that remains is of a young man afraid to drive – in Los Angeles! – even slowly and with a seat belt, in case he died in an accident before the foundation could reach and preserve him. His attitude was extreme, but akin to that of people who work 18 hours a day not because they enjoy it, but to make enough money to retire early, only to drop dead of stress on their last day of employment. Denying oneself the present for the sake of a future always seems to me irrational. (That does not mean that the opposite - denying oneself a future for the sake of the present - is rational. Which is why I always use condoms and, with occasional exceptions, pay off my credit card bills in full each month.) Or do most cryonists lead normal lives? If so, once they’ve paid their life membership or subscription and made sure that the appropriate emergency number is in their wallet or tattooed onto their arm to be contacted in case of accident, they pay no more attention to cryonics than they do to the monthly gas bill. They're enjoying life today but have a bit more insurance than the rest of us for tomorrow. Anyway, I was less interested in the average cryonist then in the concept of extended life or immortality. Google led me to two sites - the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute. On Alcor's site I looked up religion, assuming they were fellow-atheists; it seemed irrational to me that theists would choose to live for ever on this polluted, violent planet when they can spend eternity in paradise. To my initial surprise – then I remembered that most cryonists are USAmericans – I came across several articles where people of faith tied themselves into ever tighter intellectual knots proving to themselves and others that delaying entry into God’s kingdom was something that God Himself would approve of. (For an example, click here. There were a couple of places where I actually laughed, although I don't think that was the writer's intention.) Other questions that came to mind – isn’t the world going to be overpopulated and so it won’t need all these people from the “past”? won’t people wake up in a world that is worse in many ways than it is today? etc – were answered on the organisations' FAQ pages. The arguments are plausible but not convincing, and, perhaps I did not look hard enough, but I could not find an answer to questions such as how and when and by whom the decision will be made to revive bodies and what priority will be given to whom and what funds will pay for the undoubtedly complex medical procedures required. (The Cryonics Institute, for example, offers the whole caboodle for $28,000 but they conveniently forget to post costings or a budget explaining how this will translate into enough money for resuscitation and recovery 100 years from now.) I returned to Google and entered “Why live forever”. There were few interesting comments, but there was a discussion as to whether the goal of cryonics is immortality. For some, who acknowledge that all life will eventually end in death, the goal is extending life as long as possible. Others, however, seek immortality. In a cyber discussion that took place in 1993 (yes, Dearly Beloved, the internet has been going that long), one John Eastmond posted the following comment. (For the original, click here.
All these issues, questions and answers, about immortality, God, the morality of “resurrection”, knowledge, overpopulation, the state of the planet one hundred years from now etc are interesting but ultimately irrelevant. They are only rationalisations masking the central question – do you or I want to live forever? – and its corollary – are we afraid of death? No rational person can be afraid of death, because there is nothing to fear. The afterlife is a myth and death is non-consciousness or non-existence. Dying, however, is a different question. Personally, I hope that my dying will either be instantaneous or give me time to come to terms with it. The little experience I have from watching others die is that like a melting lump of clay the personality dissolves from the individual we once knew into a kind of proto-human and then into nothing. For a time there may be suffering, but as the individual comes to understand and accept what is happening, the suffering goes. The real question is not death but life. Certainly, the older I get, the longer I want to live. Having passed my first half-century, but feeling mentally and physically twenty years younger, I do not welcome the idea of decaying health and intellect. In an earlier column I declared my intention of postponing my death until my 110th birthday and suggested that passing away in the arms of a handsome call-boy (suitably compensated for his trauma) was my preferred exit. It remains my goal. But to live 200, 300 years or more? While I wouldn’t object to another fifty or so years of excellent health and would take a few more at impaired health out of curiosity, I probably do not want more. This is because, John Eastmond, I do accumulate knowledge as I grow older, but that knowledge, although valuable, reduces the element of surprise in life. And it is being surprised that makes life, for me, worth living. The first time you wake up on a deserted tropical beach, it is fantastic. The hundredth time (assuming the beach remains deserted, unlikely these days), it becomes routine. When you first fall in love there is splendour and mystery and misery. When it is the fifth or sixth time, its predictability reduces its intensity. Knowledge may be an essential component of our humanity, but it does not necessarily fulfil our needs. Even if the element of surprise concerns only a few of us, others may have other priorities; most of us would probably rather be happy than wise. I suspect that immortality would confer wisdom on the few and boredom on the many. It certainly would not guarantee happiness. And despite the implication in Eastmond's argument that there is always more to do or experience, the human brain is probably incapable of incorporating information or progressing beyond a certain point. And that is likely to be the point – different in each person – at which the personality will say enough is enough; it is time to die. Most importantly, for life to be enjoyed at its fullest, the body must remain young. While there have been a few steps in medical technology that may defer the aging process by a decade or two, nothing on the horizon will maintain youth forever, far less reverse old age. When you are revived, what can you do with an enlarged heart and bones crumbling from osteoporosis except replace them? And if immortality is available to everyone, then no new organs will be available for transplant, which means that only artificial ones will be available. The logical conclusion is that for those who are vitrified when old, living forever after "resurrection" will be living in an artificial body, or spending five hundred years as a brain that is alert while the limbs and organs are stiff and deformed. Not a particularly attractive prospect. At the edge of human existence, arguments revolve around emotion as much as, if not more than, fact. In the end the question of cryonics comes down to ego. Those who believe that their individuality is so important that it must be preserved whatever the cost will make every effort to preserve it. But my conception of myself is not so great that I must preserve it at any cost, whether that cost is to myself or to others who are deprived of the resources needed to keep my body "alive" in the hope of an uncertain future. And if to be a cryonist means always being within a few hours of a vitrification centre (where is the nearest centre to Bangkok or to those places in rural Thailand that I sometimes visit?), I am not willing to compromise the freedom of my present for an uncertain future. When I go, I’ll go, with no regrets. Of course, if I knew the process was foolproof and I would be guaranteed "resurrection" wherever I was and whatever happened to me, I would probably go ahead with it. But nothing I have read suggests that the various pieces of technology that currently exist will ever come together to allow the mass resurrections that cryonists predict. And even if the technology (and the financial means) exist, there is no guarantee that anyone in the future will be prepared to do it. (The social and legal conditions for reviving the vitrified one hundred years from now may be quite unexpected. Perhaps only those known to have a certain IQ or to be innocent of every felony misdemeanour will be allowed to be revived...) Still, I wish cryonists luck; I suspect they’re going to need it. |
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2003 columns... 2001 - 2 columns... This month's good cause:  |
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