Humanist death apologetics
Some contemporary atheists and secular humanists do not stop at debunking the idea of God but seem to think that making a persuasive case against religion requires them to refute all of its associated...
View ArticleNon-existence is hard to do
A review of contemporary antinatalist writings Originally published in Cryonics, 2nd Quarter, 2010 (PDF) “Coming into existence is bad in part because it invariably leads to the harm of ceasing to...
View ArticleReview of 'Better Never to Have Been'
Review of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence by David Benatar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 “Would that I had never been born” is a lament sometimes voiced in the...
View ArticleIs a life worth starting? Some personal views
For life—the life of any sentient creature—to be worth living, there must, as Robert Ettinger has often said, be a preponderance of satisfaction over dissatisfaction. If this overall slant toward good...
View ArticlePaul Edwards on the fear of death
In his book God and the Philosophers, the Austrian American atheist philosopher Paul Edwards writes: When we die we do not return to the “bosom of Nature” or the bosom of anything. After death we will...
View ArticleNeural cryobiology and the legal recognition of cryonics
It has been said that if you want to persuade someone, you need to find common ground. But one of the defining characteristics of cryonics is that proponents and opponents cannot even seem to agree on...
View ArticleMedico-Legal Aspects of Human Cryopreservation Optimization
Introduction Ongoing legal challenges and hostile interference of relatives have increased awareness among cryonicists that addressing the likelihood that one will be cryopreserved at all should take...
View ArticleSteve Jobs’ morbid glorification of death
According to Steve Jobs, death is such a great benefit to mankind that it would have to be invented if it did not exist: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to...
View ArticleChemopreservation in the real world
It is generally not the task of scientists to consider the legal, financial, and logistical limitations when searching for biomedical breakthroughs but there are good examples where considering the...
View ArticleUltrastructural Signatures of Information-Theoretic Death
On October 11, 2013, the Wall Street Journal featured a cover story about the unintended consequences of Norway’s long-time insistence on “plastic graves” (“Grave Problem: Nothing is Rotting in the...
View ArticleCryonics and Natural Selection
“…it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself” so reads a quote that, in...
View ArticleReintegration, Personalized
The latter half of therapeutic cryopreservation involves three “R”s: resuscitation, rehabilitation, and reintegration. Of the three, reintegration receives the least attention as to its content, so...
View ArticleThe Valley of the Shadow of Death
The “uncanny valley” is a theory described in 1970 by robotics professor Masahiro Mori which posits that as a robot’s appearance becomes more human-like, observer affinity towards it will increase...
View ArticleKilling Yourself to Live
I recently observed a heated exchange on Facebook about cryonics. One person said something to the effect that cryonics lacks evidence and that chemical preservation (“chemopreservation”) is the...
View ArticleI’m Not Dead Yet!
The prevailing view among cryonics advocates is that cryonics patients are not dead. This view is reflected in the cryonics custom of calling people who are cryopreserved “patients” instead of corpses....
View ArticleMedical Myopia and Brain Death
Recently someone sent me a number of papers that discussed the biophilosophical underpinnings of brain death. Medical doctors increasingly find themselves in the midst of heated debates about what...
View ArticlePremedication in Cryonics Revisited
Disclaimer: Alcor cannot provide medical care for living patients and must regard the care and medication of legally living members as the sole responsibility of members and their treating physicians....
View ArticleChemopreservation in the real world
It is generally not the task of scientists to consider the legal, financial, and logistical limitations when searching for biomedical breakthroughs but there are good examples where considering the...
View ArticleUltrastructural Signatures of Information-Theoretic Death
On October 11, 2013, the Wall Street Journal featured a cover story about the unintended consequences of Norway’s long-time insistence on “plastic graves” (“Grave Problem: Nothing is Rotting in the...
View Article
