What's the main hurdle?There are major cultural and psychological barriers that have to be overcome and I think eventually they will be. Open heart surgery, that had a lot of resistance early on and the same thing with anesthesia—people made up ridiculous excuses. They didn't want to use anesthesia in childbirth—you couldn't do that because women are supposed to suffer in childbirth, it's punishment for your sins. It's amazing what people rationalize.If we were trying to get rich, there would be far better ways of doing it; this is the hardest thing in the world to persuade people of.
Why is the structure rather than the function so important?Everything we know about personality tells us that it's stored in physical changes in the brain. Apart from very short term memory where the last few minutes is all electrical activity, anything longer than that is stored in changes in the neurotransmitter connections in the brain. That's what we're preserving under good circumstances. We're not just being speculative and taking a leap of faith. We've started a program of doing CT scans of our neuro patients. We can't do full body patients because they're too big to go through the scanners. People just assume that the CT scan won't work through an aluminum can, but it turns out it does. We can get really good readings of people's brains and see how we're doing.we need to have a third category where the dead have rights… Right now, the patients are our property basically; they have no separate legal status.
Do people have funerals or memorial services at Alcor? You can't really do 'open casket' with those big metal containers.We don't do anything, no, but it's up to the patient's families what they do. It's probably different if you don't believe it's going to work and you'd probably just treat it like a regular memorial. It's a bit trickier if you do think it's going to work: you're kind of saying good bye, but hopefully more of a "see you later." So you have to emotionally deal with the fact that you're not going to see this person for a long time, but you don't want to completely let go. If it's your brother or sister or spouse or something, you might want to write to them once a year. We keep records for people so when they come back they can catch up.The vast majority of our members are not really religious, for obvious reasons—if you really believe in a religion then you believe in an afterlife, and it might seem less important to come back. You figure, why bother struggling on Earth when I'm going to go to a nice easy place. Although I don't know how people think they know what heaven's like, really. It's not really well described anywhere; it sounds pretty boring to me. Laying on a cloud playing the harp or basking in God's glory seems pretty dull.If you do have religious beliefs though, I think there's no incompatibility whatsoever. Who turns down a process for a radical surgery that might save you from cancer or heart disease?
If these people come back, will they be the same person?My view is inspired by the work of Derek Parfit at Oxford. His basic approach is a refinement of some earlier approaches. John Locke proposed that you're the same person over time if you have memory over time and I thought that was partly right, because what exactly does memory mean? You have declarative memory, procedural memory, and so on.Parfit was saying if you take these various psychological aspects, memories, dispositions and values, we can consider you the same person over time if there are enough connections between you in 2004 and you in 2014, for instance. If there's enough overlap at any particular time, although the exact criterion can be a little messy, then you are a continuous individual.You might have a car accident and your head gets bashed in, and you might lose your memory or your personality drastically changes—we might still legally call you the same person, but you're not. Being the same person is a matter of degree. It's not your body—that's not who you are.So when you say "I", what are you talking about?You're a collection of all your psychological traits, memories, values, all those things that cause you to act in various ways. There's no soul that I can see, I have no use for the concept of a soul. That's really a peculiar idea that no one has ever really made any sense of to me. What use is a soul?So in the event of information theoretic death, what do you think happens to "you"? Are you afraid of that kind of death?I'm not there. It's hard to even say I'm dead then, because I'm not at all. One thing I think people get wrong about death is that they think it's kind of a conditional state. I'm not afraid of death. That doesn't even make sense to me, how could I be afraid of death? Death isn't anything, it's just the lack of being.What I don't like about death is not that it's something to be feared or a bad experience, what's bad about it is that it's the end of experiences. It's the end of all the things I enjoy—it's the end of creativity, of loving—they're all gone and that's why it's bad, not because there is anything inherently bad about it. So I really don't fear death in that sense; I fear dying. I fear dying a miserable, horrible death where I'm suffering, but I don't fear being dead. That's incoherent, it doesn't make any sense.-@DMOberhausRelated stories:DEATH's the end of creativity, of loving—they're all gone, and that's why it's bad, not because there is anything inherently bad about it.