Ever since I learned that people eventually died, I have had this fear of death churning away in the background. As a child I was always thinking “isn’t there something we can do about this?”
I considered cryopreservation for many years and then signed up as a neuro – which means I’ll only have my head preserved – in 2007. It made perfect sense to me that the mind arises as an emergent property of the brain and that it might be possible to preserve that.
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I don’t know whether it will be possible to bring someone back because it’s hard to know what kind of repair work you would have to do to correct any deterioration. Is it a case of engineering viruses or blood cells that are available now, or using nanomachines to move atoms around in order to fix clinically dead brains? Or will it need technology that isn’t even close to existing right now? Our brains might even just be scanned into a computer at a molecular level and made up of algorithms. We just can’t predict what will happen, but I see it primarily as an engineering problem.
So I don’t think of how it might work, but of what kind of values might be around at the time. I’d like to live in a much more open society – a place where everyone is accepted.
When you sign up it’s a bit like donating your body to science. There’s a fair bit of legal paperwork and the finances to sort out. I pay for mine through a life insurance policy that pays Alcor Life Extension Foundation upon my death. It’s about £50 a month.
I discussed it with my wife for several years, but didn’t tell anyone else until I’d signed up. My parents and siblings realise I’m not a crazy person, so they’re generally supportive. But it is really hard for a lot of people to understand; you’re asking them to completely overturn their views of the finality of death. If you believe, for religious or philosophical reasons, that the self is something other than an emergent property of the architecture of the brain, then cryonics makes no sense at all.
I don’t think we should rest on our laurels and be satisfied with our lot. How do we know that we should be happy with this amount of life? We should keep on being curious, keep a childlike mindset where we’re always probing away at things we don’t understand and taking joy in experimentation. Imagine the regret in the future if this is something that works out and we realise we’ve got all these people that we’ve lost that we could have saved?
I don’t agree with people who say it’s unethical. Where’s the wisdom in losing the accrued knowledge of someone who’s lived for decades? I think death is a terrible, terrible thing. Giving yourself the option, however minute, of keeping hold of all that knowledge and experience is surely the responsible thing to do.”
