Larry King Wants to be Frozen and Brought Back to Life After Death

I think it’s an acceptable concern- but I don’t think it’s a fear in that they are afraid of what follows death, rather a dislike for the inevitable change of existence for nonexistence.  I’m more pleased that they aren’t deluded into thinking there will be praise, trumpets, and virgins waiting for them.  I completely empathize with the desire to live forever.  The world is a mindbogglingly interesting place, with far too much to discover to fit into one life-time.  Having existence, then not having existence, I’d rather keep existence (with the choice of ceasing existence on my own terms). 

“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.” – Michel de Montaigne 

It does. They like to say that they’ll just keep you frozen until somebody figures out how to fix that too, but when it comes down to “every cell in your body ruptured by ice crystals,” I think you’re pretty much toast. Or, anti-toast, as it were.

I think it’s perfectly normal to fear death – after all, that’s a good instinct for a successful species.  I just think it’s funny that his answer to it is to be frozen – which is to say, to die – in hope of being brought back. It never occurs to him that once he’s dead and frozen, he won’t *care* if he’s brought back any more – he’ll be dead meat, an icicle, unable to care.

Even if they could cure what ailed him, and even if the cellular damage could be dealt with, whatever makes people think that other people would be motivated to bring them back to life? Like somebody 250 years from now will care enough about Larry King to want to revive him? 

Do you have a favorable (or not immediately dismissive) opinion of any of the transhuman-utopian mortality offramps? Uploading? SENS? Jason’s Ship?

We can comfort each other all we want on this issue, but in the end there is no evidence that the universe cares how we feel about death or that any of our platitudes are true. It may just be that we die and there is no “purpose” to that. I think it’s better to accept this apparent reality at this time.

I’m kind of looking forward to being dead. Not dying — that’s going to suck. But after that, there’s nothing more to worry about. No more bills to pay, no taxes, no having to catch buses or trains or getting stuck in traffic, no hunger, no pain, no illness, no social anxiety under any circumstances, no more feeling of needing a few more hours of sleep, no snow to shovel or leaves to rake… sure, it’ll be a little boring, but since I won’t be able to tell that’s hardly a downside.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to trade that for temporarily being brought back and having to worry about dying again.

My thoughts exactly.  How big does your ego have to be to assume that someone in the distant future will go to great lengths to reanimate your body?

I was much more terrified of death as a christian than I am as an atheist. Which is weird, because as a christian I was promised this everlasting paradise after death. Why would I fear that?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that now I do not fear death so much as dread it. I hate the idea of all the cool stuff I will miss out on after I’m gone. But now I believe that since I simply won’t exist anymore, it won’t be a problem.

Sure, I’d love the opportunity to have a few more hundred years. But the main reason I don’t think I’d go the cryogenics route is that I plan to donate usable organs to those who need them and have a shot at a few more years of life if they get them, and short of that (if I’m too sick for my organs to be useful), to donate my body to scientific and medical research, in hopes of aiding some scientific breakthrough, prolonging the life of some other brilliant people who can then go on to do awesome things. That’s what I hope for.

This future might not be as far off as you imagine.  Your grandchildren might want to see grandpa again.

I don’t think it has that much to do with ego…at least for me.  I don’t think I’m that special and that the future will benefit from having me around, but I just really enjoy being alive and would love to see what happens next, and I am willing to take a chance that maybe someone in the future will reanimate me.

I’m assuming reanimation is going to occur in a society that is probably more utopian than dystopian, since I doubt a dystopian society will have the resources/time/technology to revive cryopreserved individuals, and even if they did they probably wouldn’t do it.  Thus, we don’t get revived if the world goes downhill, small chance we do if it goes uphill…it may seem silly, but I’ll take it.  I just really like living.

Cryogenics is a long shot, but you’re a hell of a lot more likely to get revived that way than getting buried or cremated.

If life is energy, it can be converted into another form of energy – heat, for instance.

The great  baseball Hall of Famer/ atheist Ted Williams
is in a cryogenics tube right now. Hope it works out for him.

Christians are conditioned from birth to worry about forever,
to worry about what imaginary fate awaits us after death. We don’t need heaven
or hell to give our lives meaning. We provide our own meaning. Think of time as
a dimension, like length, width, and depth (it is in many ways). We will always
have this time, now, the present. The chance to live and love, right now, at
this moment, is ours, and no future person or event can steal this moment from us. Why bind our hope to what happens after we die? That is not our time; we won’t worry about it then, why worry about it now? 

Our experience of time is an illusion, really, as is our
sense of “I”. My consciousness is not the same “person”,
that existed in my body 10 years ago. (most of my body’s cells have all
replaced themselves). I’m not really even the person I was a moment ago.

Our experience of the passing of time is as much an emergent property as our consciousness. Why not enjoy this moment, rather than waste it worrying over moments that do not exist?

Fixing the Typo …

Saying “emergence ” tells us as much *about* consciousness as the saying “magic”.   See here

I don’t care how slow a news day it was on the atheist front, there had to be something more substantive than this to put up. 

 I feared death as a christian, now I do not. Living is lovely, but evntually the show will go on without me. That’s fine. It started without me. I get my moment in the sun and that is enough.

Your just-so story is implausible in several ways.  I’ll point out one: 

If technology improves so much that we can reanimate frozen people or upload their minds, then the scarcity of resources problem will be essentially solved.  Future humans won’t need your labor.

It does not necessarily follow, but reanimation or mind uploading will probably depend on advanced nanotechnology .  Being able to build things and control things at the atomic level would change everything.

No, you made a statement that made it clear that one (the scarcity of resources) would be solved by the other (reanimation of humans). That means you feel that one would follow from the other. How can it be otherwise?

” Being able to build things and control things at the atomic level would change everything.”

Really? How would it change everything?  How do you know these things to be true?
We have control over the atom to the extent that we can create nuclear energy, yet people are still starving in this world.
Not to be nit-picky, but you made some extraordinarily specific claims without substantiating them.

To be more specific, you implied that the technology necessary to reanimate humans would directly effect the availability of resources in a positive way.

I’ve been looking into cryonics and am strongly considering it. While fear of death can be a relevant motivator there are other motivators also. If humans end up going to Mars I want to see that. If we figure out whether P != NP or if the Riemann hypothesis is true, I want to find out that. There are two many interesting things out there that aren’t likely to happen in my life time.  The ability to revive preserved humans is an interesting enough technology by itself that even if almost nothing else has changed I will be able to look at that and go “huh, that’s pretty cool.”(Of course this technology is so far beyond anything we have now that if we get to that point we’ll likely have a lot of other interesting stuff.)

One of my main concerns is that cryonics and organ donation aren’t very compatible. So if I sign up for cryonics I may be taking a gamble that effectively kills other people. However, there are ways to do both. Moreover, the most likely forms of death where organs can be harvested are situations where there’s severe brain trauma which makes cryonics pointless.

I thought the crypt keeper was already dead? Ba-dump-bump.
Larry King looks like he’s already been frozen and revived. I think he’s lived long enough. Who the hell wants him revived anyways? I mean, besides himself.

I think Larry King’s watched way too much Futurama. I hope he gets brought back as a pickled head in a jar, bobbing for fish food.

You’ve never watched The Sleeper, have you?

“I think energy is life”

Assume this statement is true. Therefore, cars alive because they move and therefore have kinetic energy? Is a cloud of gas alive because of the thermal energy contained in it? What about a circuit with current flowing in it, is that alive? Light itself must also be alive because photons carry energy?

“and can’t be destroyed”

Oh, it is pitifully easy to end life, human, animal or microscopic. Do you wash your clothes? Millions of bacteria die when you do. If you mean energy cannot be destroyed, then yes (to an extent), conservation of energy does imply this. There is no principle of conservation of life, if you were wondering.

“there’s an article”

[citation needed]

“about the heart having neurotransmitters”

Neurotransmitter: “a substance…that is released from…a presynaptic neuron…and that travels across the synaptic cleft
to…the target cell.” (Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, paraphrased)

Given that heartbeat is regulated by brain signals, I would very much hope that there are neurotransmitters in it. This isn’t a revelation.

“and being associated with intelligence”

Containing neurotransmitters does not associate that organ with intelligence. The nervous system extends throughout the entire body, so your argument could equally well be applied to the pancreas, the spleen, or the left breast.

“and the material that is associated with the galaxy stars and all of life”

What the fuck am I reading.

I’ll tell you what IS associated with stars, it’s where the heavier elements in our body (anything above helium in atomic mass) come from. They must be made by nuclear fusion, because no other process is energetic enough to do so. Anything above iron in atomic mass is even harder to create – supernova is required.

Just because your constituent elements were made in stars does not mean stars can think. Or whatever your point is, you’ve presented it rather incoherently here.

“I think our energy as such becomes the collective that is creation”

So you have reasoned that the universe contains energy. I’m not sure what you mean by “our energy”. On the assumption you mean the chemical energy stored in human bodies, I think I can say to a reasonable degree of certainty that the entire universe does not consist of adenosine triphosphate. I have made here the further assumption that the universe is what you refer to with the phrase “the collective that is creation”.

I will also say with equal certainty that molecules of ATP did not become the universe.

“I would like to call that collective God and unite and promote that”

A: God is the universe
B: The universe exists
C: Therefore, god exists

I’ll admit this is internally consistent logic, A and B do imply C. If you want to define your god this way be my guest, I think Einstein had similar views. I only object to the label “god” because it’s a loaded word that conjures up the idea of something that takes a personal interest in human life, which we all know the universe at large does not. I’ll remind you that this is not a theist’s definition of god, far from it.

“so I’m not really an atheist”

Your worldview has a name, it is called pantheism. I do not generally consider pantheism to be atheistic, others differ. If you ascribe any “spiritual” aspect to reality, I don’t consider that atheism.

“I just define God within a realistic science based extrapolation”

So you’ve taken physics, neuroscience and stellar evolution, and thrown them together after completely misunderstanding the concepts defined in each discipline. You don’t make any testable hypotheses, nor do you offer evidence for any of your claims. This is what you advance as a realistic, science based extrapolation.

Not only is this not right, it’s not even wrong.

That’s one possibility.  Another is that once they figure out how to revive me the world has become a technological utopia and even the idea of “money” is outdated.  Then I get to live again, for as long as I want, in a world where I’m free to do pretty much whatever I like.

Both scenarios are possible and probably each as likely.  Either beats the alternative of not existing ever again.  I’m a big fan of being alive; I’d like to keep this going for as long as possible.

 No more sex.  No more football games.  No more Assassin’s Creed. No more pizza buffets. No more sex.

I’m happy to rake leaves if it means I get to do those other things.  And I want to keep doing those other things indefinitely.

There will come a time when not only do you and I not exist, but no-one exists, no life exists, and nothing of any kind remains that could, even hypothetically, suggest that it ever did. Then we, and all our loves, works and ambitions, quite literally might as well never have been.Which is pretty depressing.
And that, my dears, is why Carl and Ann sent made the Voyager record.

Look, eventually the Sun will go nova and all that is this planet (and us, if we haven’t managed to get off it) will be burned away.  And eventually all the stars will go nova and slowly burn out, and if they are right about the Hubble constant, the Universe will go dark.  But that doesn’t change the fact that today, right here, right now, we can teach something, learn something, comfort someone, love someone, achieve something, and make something beautiful.

Check-out Sierra Sciences and Dr Bill Andrews work. Fountain of youth is closer than you think.

I think he’s lived long enough.

If he had a medical emergency, would you not want to help?

I’m a transhumanist. I’m also a skeptic. One thing I’m not is a cynic. There is unfortunately a large amount of woo that gives the movement a bad wrap. I ignore all that. I also accept that excited speculations of the future may be overly optimistic. One thing I do NOT do is discount all the associated technology. The fact of the matter is that we are making huge strides in the field of genetics, neuroscience, computer engineering, and molecular engineering. The brain is an organic machine. We can already interface computers and brains on a crude level. To say “X isn’t possible” is just as ignorant of a blanket statement as when it was said that manned-flight was impossible. Maybe I’ll die before it happens, but I’m hoping that I’ll get my mind uploading some day. I’ll be able to learn 1000 languages, master every instrument I want, play every song I want, see every movie I haven’t seen, read every book I haven’t read, write every book I haven’t written, finally (really) understand quantum mechanics, see the moons of Jupiter from an android body, experience what it’s like to distribute your consciousness, meet myself and see what others see, feel colors, live life as a woman, live life as an animal, live life as something I created. Hell… I could never get bored… And if I do? *shrug*. I just delete myself.

In two thousand years, you might raise your ambitions.

Nanotechnology does NOT mean being able to take random atoms and putting them together into molecules at will. Being able to manipulate very small structures is not the same as having infinite resources or infinite energy.

Yes, head only is possible and cheaper. But in practice, head only preservation with organ donation is difficult. It would be nice if there were more cooperation between the organ donation groups and the cryonic groups so this was more doable. 

I don’t get the concern that everything you’ve done in your life will go forgotten after you die. I mean, you’ll be dead. Why would you care? Even people who did worthwhile things are barely remembered by their own family a few generations down the line.  It’s like the obsession some people have with ensuring our species continues. What does it matter if you’re dead and gone anyway? Enjoy the time you have now because tomorrow you may not exist and that’s alright with the rest of us.

Only some kinds of frog.  The special kind.

Do you never go to sleep? In many senses your brain goes off during that.  Have you never been under general  anaesthesia? You brain goes off then too in a much deeper sense. But your memories and personality remain intact. If it is possible to “restart” the brain and keep your memories intact then how is that not you? 

I’m not expecting infinite future resources or unlimited control at the atomic level, but if we are able to reconstruct a brain that has been pronounced dead by today’s medical community and then frozen to −196 °C — then yea, we’ll have plenty.

The OP mused that future humans will want money from those who have been reanimated.  I said no, scarcity of resources will be “essentially solved”. Should I have offered a disclaimer that I’m not talking about more energy than the Sun?  In hind-sight, I guess so.

I can how the wording would imply that. Maybe just interpret their point that if we have the technology to reanimate people and are willing to do so then it is extremely likely that the resource issues have been largely solved? 

Well, let’s see:
– If you live to late middle age, chances are good you won’t be going to pizza buffets any more.
– If you live to old age, chances are good you won’t be having sex any more.
– Assassin’s Creed isn’t going to keep working forever; chances are good that 20 years from now you won’t be able to run it at all without spending a disproportionate amount of time and effort. And as you get older, newer games will be targeted at people who have younger, springier neurons and reflexes than you, so you’ll probably eventually have no interest in new games.

On the other hand, I know plenty of elderly people who pay bills, rake leaves, shovel snow, pay taxes, catch buses and trains, get stuck in traffic, get hungry, get sick, go through pain — increasing amounts of it, in fact, suffer social anxiety… if you think football games — and by that I mean “watching them, probably from home” — are sufficient comfort to compensate for the rest, then more power to you, I suppose, but you don’t sound like you spend much time around old people.

It may indeed be possible, or inevitable given enough time. I think whatever freezing they’re doing is a dog to actually work or provide what is needed in the future. I’m also skeptical due to the fact most people can’t even accept more basic science today so I would think some of those transhuman advances are improbable. 

Why does Larry King think that anyone would be interested in
bringing him back to life?