The Ethics of Cryonics
Page 7
Some of the possible future scenarios we explored are far from encouraging and might even be severe enough to dissuade some people from choosing cryonics. But there is as yet no proof that such scenarios are more accurate, or more likely to become a reality, than the more optimistic ones. To some people, especially those who attribute great value to living longer and living in the future, it will be worthwhile to give cryonics a try regardless of any possible mishaps that could occur. They are not dissuaded by the thought that things could go awry.
Uncertainty, after all, is a hallmark of human existence. To a certain extent, we are gambling on the future in all our investments: we buy houses in places that look breath-taking, but that in a few years’ time could appear completely different due to wars, earthquakes, or other unpredictable events. We choose to share our life with someone who seems to embody everything we could desire in a human being, but who, for all we know, might turn out to be a very skilled sociopath. We invest time, money, and other resources in projects that never materialize or turn out far worse than we expected.
Cryonics is not so different from all these other long-term investments. Luck may play a part in whether the enterprise is successful, yet hard work still improves one’s chances and makes one “luckier”. As ever, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
References
Alcor. (n.d.). Cryonics FAQ. Retrieved February 13, 2018, from http://alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html
Bingham, J. (2015, January 22). Average cost of raising a child in UK £230,000. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11360819/Average-cost-of-raising-a-child-in-UK-230000.html
Canavero, S. (2013). HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage (GEMINI). Surgical Neurology International, 4(Suppl. 1), S335–S342. https://doi.org/10.4103/2152-7806.113444
Chalmers, D. (2010). The singularity: A philosophical analysis. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17(9–1), 7–65. Retrieved from http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2010/00000017/F0020009/art00001
Chin-Yee, N., D’Egidio, G., Thavorn, K., Heyland, D., & Kyeremanteng, K. (2017). Cost analysis of the very elderly admitted to intensive care units. Critical Care/The Society of Critical Care Medicine, 21(1), 109. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-017-1689-y
Cost-Effectiveness. (2017, November). Retrieved January 10, 2018, from https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness
Kaufman, J. (2011, September 25). How likely is cryonics to work? Retrieved February 15, 2018, from http://lesswrong.com/lw/7sj/how_likely_is_cryonics_to_work/
Perry, M. (2015). Suspension failures: Lessons from the early years. In A. De Wolf & S. W. Bridge (Eds.), Preserving minds, saving lives: The best cryonics writings from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Retrieved from https://market.android.com/details?id=book-6QgvjgEACAAJ (Original work published 1990).
Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking. Retrieved from http://www.ceeol.com/content-files/document-263597.pdf
Telegraph Video. (2016, September 20). Russian man set for world’s first head transplant. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/20/russian-man-set-for-worlds-first-head-transplant/
Wahls, J. (2017, June 5). Utopia, LOL? Retrieved January 11, 2018, from http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/utopia-lol/
Footnotes
1For a discussion of future potential brain uploading technologies, see Chalmers (2010).
2The study covers the period 2009–2013. Cost figures in the article are given in Canadian dollars but exchange rates in US dollars hovered around 1.0 during this period, so parity between the two currencies is assumed here. Figures given in the article are rounded to the nearest thousand.
3(7 × 5000) + 32,000.
4Some of the dues and funding for cryonics goes to organ preservation and ischemia research, so even if cryonics were to fail, not all of the money spent on cryonics-related research would result in a waste of money.
5For an interesting discussion on the online forum Less Wrong regarding the probability of cryonics success, see Kaufman (2011).
6It is worth noting that there are some organizations, such as The Venturists, that address such potential issues by offering support to people who might be revived in the future.
7Thanks to Adrian Rorheim for suggesting this implication.
8For an illustrative and highly entertaining example of what such an encounter might look like, see Wahls (2017).
9Thanks to Mike Perry for highlighting this issue.
Part II
Cryonics as a Step Towards Immortality
Introduction
Most people who make arrangements for cryonics hope to “die” at an old age and be revived in a future where medicine is so advanced that the disease that caused them to die can be fixed. In this second part of the book, we will consider the ethical issues related to cryonics understood as a step towards indefinite life extension and possibly immortality.
Some scientists think that rejuvenation technologies could be developed in a not-too-distant future, at which point a person’s entire body could be kept young indefinitely (de Grey & Rae, 2007). While it is not clear yet how such treatments would work in practice, the general idea is that one could regularly rejuvenate all of one’s body at a cellular level—from neurons to liver cells—so as to remain highly functional and healthy for an indefinite time.
The reason why cryonics is expected to be paired with rejuvenating treatments is that cryonics by itself can only provide life suspension, as it were, but not life extension. That is, it can only temporarily suspend the processes that normally cause ageing, and these processes resume immediately upon revival unless additional steps are taken to halt them further. Hence, especially if one undergoes cryopreservation at an advanced age, one merely postpones the last few years of one’s experienced life, without actually extending the total amount of time one has spent alive in the biographical sense of being alive.
Let us imagine an 80-year-old patient who, after having endured Parkinson’s disease for a decade, decides to get cryopreserved in the hope that he or she may someday be revived and restored to health. One day, a century or so later, a cure is discovered that not only prevents Parkinson’s, but also reverses any damage already caused by the disease. Our cryopreserved patient is revived, cured, and restored to the level of physical health he or she enjoyed before the onset of the disease. However, he or she remains 80 years old and thus near the end of life.
Now, let us imagine that the aforementioned cure for Parkinson’s is discovered alongside hundreds of equally groundbreaking developments during a new medical revolution. Among other milestones in this future society, rejuvenation technologies have also become reasonably cheap, effective, and safe. Just as our newly revived cryonicist would have reasons to be cured of Parkinson’s, he or she would also have reasons to restore every other part of his or her health to the levels they were at before the effects of ageing set in—a biological age of around 40, say. In general, it would seem that the best option for the newly revived would be to undergo rejuvenation therapy so as to turn their biological clocks back however far they want and then regularly undergo rejuvenation in order to remain within a certain age range. Indeed, it seems that rejuvenation would be one’s only real hope of avoiding all the degenerative effects of ageing that eventually lead to death. Although some people die of cancer, heart attacks, or strokes at a young age, it is vastly more common for such conditions to befall the elderly. Even the healthiest of old people eventually die because of some unavoidable structural failure, accumulated damage, or both, within their bodies. Even though scientists do not agree ab
out the upper limit of human lifespan (Dong, Milholland, & Vijg, 2016; Rozing, Kirkwood, & Westendorp, 2017), it appears unlikely for anyone to live beyond 150 years without rejuvenating treatments. Hence, it is very plausible that in a hypothetical future where life extension is available, affordable, and routinely used to prevent the development of age-related pathological conditions, ageing would no longer be a matter of fate. It would be a matter of choice.
If ageing were a matter of choice, it is unclear whether one would have any reason to stop undergoing rejuvenation treatments after only a few cycles. After all, if we were now offered a pill that would magically make us five years younger, would not we all be tempted to take it? After how many pills would we decide that it is time to restart ageing at a natural pace and, eventually, die?
Admittedly, though, answering these questions is not as easy as it might seem. This is partly because there are many aspects of immortality that ought to be considered before enthusiastically committing to the project, but also because we humans seem to have a rather ambiguous relationship with death.
At first glance, it seems we fear death above anything. We go to great lengths to avoid dangers and live longer, and to find remedies to any accidents and diseases that might cut our lives short. Even though we place an especially high value on our own life and on the life of the people we love, we still regard almost any death as a tragic event, especially when the victim is young and is being deprived of many years of life. As a society, we ask medicine and technology to buy us more time to do the things we like, to be with the people we love, to explore the world and learn how it works. We want more time to enjoy all the pleasures of life, big and small—from drinking a glass of fresh water, to falling in love, to learning about a complex topic.
If we asked anyone whether they’d prefer to either add or subtract a given number of decent quality years to their life, we can be quite confident that almost everyone would choose to have years added rather than subtracted. Nobody wants to die—or at least, nobody wants to die right now, or tomorrow, or over the next few weeks (unless their life entails unbearable suffering, that is). It is not a coincidence that the majority of religions tend to feature one or more immortal deities who promise everlasting life to their adepts: we want to be reassured that once our mortal life is over, a new one will start.
Also, the quest for immortality is perceived by some as the ultimate act of hubris, a selfish and irresponsible attempt to become godlike (Sutton, 2015).
Yet, it is not clear that everyone or even the majority of people, even if they want their current lifespan to be prolonged, would want to be immortal. At least some people would probably say that at some point in the future, they will want to die.
So, on the one hand, death is perceived as the ultimate tragedy, something to avoid at all costs; but, on the other hand, the desire to extend life indefinitely—to become, in a word, immortal—might not be equally widespread.
It is possible that aversion to immortality is, at least in part, explained by aversion to some features commonly associated to immortality, but which are not necessary aspects thereof. Immortality is simply the fact of never dying; this fact could have certain implications that are necessary, such as the fact that one will have an infinite number of experiences, and implications that are contingent and which therefore could be avoided by changing the circumstances in which people live forever. For instance, it is possible that some people do not want to be immortal because they do not want to suffer from the aches and pains that are associated with growing extremely old; however, rejuvenating treatments could eliminate this side effect of immortality. Others may argue that in a world where no one dies, there would be serious problems of overpopulation. But overpopulation is not a necessary consequence of immortality (e.g. we could start colonizing other planets). So some objections to immortality are actually not in-principle objections, but objections to something else. If we are to object to something, then we must consider that thing in and of itself, along with its necessary (but not the contingent) implications. And if we want to object to some aspect that we associate to that something, we need to consider how bad it is relative to our other alternatives, and how we might otherwise achieve our desired result with fewer bad associated effects.
Hence, in the following two chapters, we will try to understand if there are convincing arguments against immortality in and of itself. In order to do this, we will consider, in Chap. 3, the alternative to immortality—death—and whether, and in what ways, and to what extent, it is a bad thing. This discussion will serve as a premise for a discussion, in Chap. 4, of whether immortality is not only good or bad in itself, but actually better or worse than death.
References
de Grey, A., & Rae, M. (2007). Ending aging: The rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime. St. Martin’s Press. Retrieved from https://market.android.com/details?id=book-vlBAKAESSg4C
Dong, X., Milholland, B., & Vijg, J. (2016). Evidence for a limit to human lifespan. Nature, 538(7624), 257–259. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19793
Rozing, M. P., Kirkwood, T. B. L., & Westendorp, R. G. J. (2017). Is there evidence for a limit to human lifespan? Nature, 546(7660), E11–E12. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22788
Sutton, A. (2015). Transhumanism: A new kind of Promethean Hubris. The New Bioethics: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Biotechnology and the Body, 21(2), 117–127. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27124960
© The Author(s) 2018
Francesca MinervaThe Ethics of Cryonicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78599-8_3
3. The Death Conundrum
Francesca Minerva1
(1)Philosophy and Moral Sciences, University of Ghent, Ghent, Vlaams Brabant, Belgium
Abstract
Cryonics is considered a key step towards indefinite life extension. But are there good reasons to extend the human lifespan beyond its current limit? One possible reason is that death is bad, and since death is bad, we should avoid dying by staying alive indefinitely. In this chapter, possible explanations for why death might be bad are examined. In particular, two accounts of the badness of death are considered in detail: death as deprivation of a future life and death as frustration of desires and preferences. These two accounts of the badness of death provide good reasons for considering death bad under certain circumstances (although not under all circumstances, such as when a life entails unbearable pain), yet leave open the question of whether immortality might be an even worse alternative.
Keywords
DeathIndefinite life extensionDeprivationFrustration of desiresImmortality
Is Death Bad?
One of the recurring themes in ancient Greek literature is the badness of life and the desirability of death. For instance, in Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, the chorus says “To never be born/Is the greatest fortune of all/But once we are born/It is best to return whence we came” (Sophocles, v. 1225–28, auth. trans.). A similar sentiment is expressed by Queen Hecuba in the tragedy The Trojan Women, written by Euripides, in which she says: “Do not think that anyone among the most fortunate people is happy/before they are dead” (Euripides, v. 500–10, auth. trans.). And in the Histories, Herodotus first told the tale of the brothers Kleobis and Biton, introduced as the happiest people in the world by the Athenian statesman Solon (Herodotus, 1:61, auth. trans.). According to the legend, their mother had prayed the goddess Hera to reward her sons for their extraordinary devotion and kindness. Hera agreed to reward the two siblings and, as a sign of her appreciation, she let them die quietly a few hours later. These examples are only some of the many tokens of the attitude towards life and death that characterized the ancient Greeks of the fifth century BC. To them, life was considered necessarily painful, and death was greeted as freedom from suffering. This Weltanschauung might seem incommensurably distant from that of the contemporary Western world, characterized by a v
iew that life is good, and by the desire to extend it through all the available antidotes to life-shortening threats.1 But even in Modern Western societies, although death is generally perceived as bad, not all deaths are perceived as equally bad. For instance, the death of very old people does not seem to elicit the same kind of reaction that the death of a child elicits. The (perceived) badness of death seems to steadily drop after one has started approaching the currently average lifespan, to the point that the death of a centenarian is perceived as peaceful as the disappearing of a snowman at the touch of the first rays of sunlight.
Death as Transition to Nonexistence
In philosophical terms, death can be defined as the “unequivocal and permanent end of our existence ” (Nagel, 1970). At first glance, this description might seem to illustrate the obvious badness of death—after all, how could the unequivocal and permanent end of existence be good?—but it is, in fact, a value-neutral description of fact. The fact that nonexistence is bad is not as obvious or uncontroversial as we might think. For instance, we saw that in the Greek tragedy tradition, death was not considered bad, but as a desirable way out of the inescapable suffering of life; and nonexistence, be it prenatal or postmortem, was considered better than existence.