On beign jealous of a frozen brain.
I was aware that the idea of frozing your head (or even just your head) immediately after your death, in the hope that, for some reason, somebody from the future will take the trouble to bring you back to life, is not particularly popular.
Yours Truly? Yes, I would like to see the future... but I will do that tomorrow. Hell, the next second, yes? :D
Seriously, I think I would like to see the world of 2100. Why? Well, because it is not too far away to be unrecognizable (I hope), and because I think it will look very simmilar to Transhuman Space.
But I never thought it could be the source of marital friction:
There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Va. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that can be done. She doesn’t like these phrases, but she tolerates them. The one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future resuscitation. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.
(...)“I’m just really terribly curious,” Robin told me in January over Skype. “Cryonics isn’t just living a little longer. It’s also living quite a bit delayed into the future.” Peggy’s initial response to this ambition, rooted less in scientific skepticism than in her personal judgments about the quest for immortality, has changed little in the past 20-odd years. Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché.
It seems that, among the few dozen people who have the means & the desire to have their head (or brain) frozen, it si very difficult to have your spouse accede to such wishes. Heck, it even has a name: "hostile-wife phenomenon": the 'wife' part is because (nonreligious, white) men comprise the majority of people who desire to be frozen.
And why they feel that way? I think the author got it right: "(...) to plan to be rocketed into the future - a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway - is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, (...) of betrayal and abandonment."
Go figure.
Anyway, it is time (now!) for Twining's Lemon Twist tea. See you in the future.
Yours Truly? Yes, I would like to see the future... but I will do that tomorrow. Hell, the next second, yes? :D
Seriously, I think I would like to see the world of 2100. Why? Well, because it is not too far away to be unrecognizable (I hope), and because I think it will look very simmilar to Transhuman Space.
But I never thought it could be the source of marital friction:
There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Va. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that can be done. She doesn’t like these phrases, but she tolerates them. The one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future resuscitation. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.
(...)“I’m just really terribly curious,” Robin told me in January over Skype. “Cryonics isn’t just living a little longer. It’s also living quite a bit delayed into the future.” Peggy’s initial response to this ambition, rooted less in scientific skepticism than in her personal judgments about the quest for immortality, has changed little in the past 20-odd years. Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché.
It seems that, among the few dozen people who have the means & the desire to have their head (or brain) frozen, it si very difficult to have your spouse accede to such wishes. Heck, it even has a name: "hostile-wife phenomenon": the 'wife' part is because (nonreligious, white) men comprise the majority of people who desire to be frozen.
And why they feel that way? I think the author got it right: "(...) to plan to be rocketed into the future - a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway - is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, (...) of betrayal and abandonment."
Go figure.
Anyway, it is time (now!) for Twining's Lemon Twist tea. See you in the future.