Four little things

For the past couple days, I've been bouncing back and forth between the bathrooms at the office in order to read two lengthy biographical profiles in two separate issues of the New Yorker - a magazine which now hates me, because I can't even post a link to an article from LAST WEEK'S (dated this week, but that's another beef for another post) issue. See, unlike every other periodical publication on the planet, the New Yorker has seen fit to completely digitize their archive through some sort of flash player... you see the layout exactly as you would if you were holding the paper copy in front of you, with the cartoons interspersed in the articles and everything, but it's a flat image. You can't highlight the text, no copy-pasta... the pages aren't even pdf, half of them are jpgs and half are pngs. Utmost fail. I do, however, have Adobe Acrobat here at the office... I might make my own pdfs and toss them up to mediafire for future safekeeping.

The best I can do for now, though, is tell you a bit about them and post links to the abstracts. First up, "The Iceman." In the far reaches of the frigid north, fittingly, a ninety-one year old man is leading the charge for cryogenic freezing to replace standard burial practices. In Ettinger's ideal vision of the future, everyone on earth takes turns playing Frye - being "reanimated" in a couple hundred years, checking out the sights, and going back to sleep to give someone else a shot/wait another couple centuries to see what else is happening. I have two major questions about this: 1) since you can only be frozen by having your body pumped full of antifreeze after you die, meaning that your brain is off - electricity, dead, synapses, dead. Let's grant that in the distant future, there's a way to reanimate your cells physically - where is the scientific basis for believing that that body would actually be you? I mean presuming you could walk and talk, would you be able to reminisce about your past, or even care that you were alive again, let alone at all? If you didn't have memories, wouldn't it really traumatize you to be a zombie? You probably wouldn't even know what a zombie is, you wouldn't have any language at all - you'd be an infant trapped in an adult body with a fully developed yet completely empty brain. How would that even begin to work?

Second question is, say you even can get over this whole dead synapse thing (and please, if you know anything about neuroscience at all, by all means let me know what the plausible scenarios are here), or work out the cylonesque up- and downloading of consciousness... anyway, say reanimation works, and when you wake up, you are still aware that you are you and this thing has happened and you understand that you are in the future... and so are ten thousand other people that day whose turn it is to live again. If everyone is really truly living in turns, for a few years at a time, say, how does progress continue? By the third or fourth cycle, will anything have even changed? We have the innovations we have today because of the combination of the collective unconscious and the constant injection of new minds into the macro thought process. You build off what's come before... and if you're what came before, and so is everyone else, and if everyone was only in it to see the rocket cars and moon colonies, then it just stops. Right? At the end of the day, I respect the equitable impulse to say that everyone should be able to have their turn at glimpsing FutureEarth, but... how long would that actually be interesting? How long until people would begin to not refreeze? Is it possible to be that petrified of death?

The way the New Yorker piece describes Ettinger's history and psychology, I think perhaps this freezing nonsense is the (pseudo)scientific equivalent of the rapture mania in the far-out evangelical churches of America. As a young boy, Ettinger feverishly read sci-fi stories about conquering death and the consequences thereof; after being shot in the Second World War, he even wrote one of his own. Interestingly, his story has an odd sort of twist that makes cryogenics seem much less appealing than you'd think the founder of a lab warehouse for it would want you to think it is. I would describe it to you, but I firmly believe this is an article worth reading, and so on Monday, I will make the pdf and post it. Plus, this is long enough already, and those four little things I was going to post became one big thing so rapidly that, aside from the other article, I can't even remember what the third and fourth things are. Ooopsie. More soon.