Freezing body when dead

[iwanttofight]

What are the benifits of freezing a body when you die? I was at a party last night and this was one of the topics that came up. I think this topic is very interesting because when you die and you freeze your body, maybe in 200 years scientists will be able to make you alive again. Have you watched demolition man? thats what happened to Stallone and Wesley Snipes.

 

[Atom Smasher]

I believe that once the spirit leaves the body, that's it. Having been formerly involved with the occult and magic arts, I have clearly seen that the spiritual realm is real and that we are not just a bunch of chemicals.

I will not deny the worms their feast for a better place awaits.

 

[Nimm]

One life span is enough
There is allready talks about how the world is getting overpopulated.

Oh and on Demolition Man, they were put into cryostaisis while they were still alive... so

 

[Deep Dish]

iwanttofight:
What are the benefits of freezing a body when you die?… I think this topic is very interesting because when you die and you freeze your body, maybe in 200 years scientists will be able to make you alive again.

That is one big “maybe.” The hope is that someday nanotechnology will advance to where life can be reconstructed on the molecular level, but there is no benefit beyond being a frozen guinea pig. It is within the human spirit for “hope springs eternal” for us to endeavor to cheat death, with ever alluring speculative ideas, but throughout history the promise has never been fulfilled. There is no good reason to believe the future will be any different. Science does have its limits, so the conquests of scientific advancements in the past hold no certainty for the future.

One hook the cryonics folks use is to give hope that a cure for a disease one dies of today will be found tomorrow, allowing that cure to be applied to the thawed body before or while bringing the dead person back to life. Cryonics might be called resurrection by technology and believers in it might be classified as suffering from the Moses syndrome. The simple fact is once you are dead, you are dead forever.

The technology exists to freeze or preserve people and that technology is improving and will probably get better. The technology to revivify a frozen body exists in the imagination. Nanotechnology, for example, is a technology that supporters of cryonics appeal to. Someday, they say, we'll be able to rebuild anything, including diseased or damaged cells in the body, with nanobots. So, no matter what disease destroyed healthy cells in the living body before preservation and no matter what damage was done to the cells of the frozen body during storage, nanotechnology will allow us to bring the dead back to life. This seems like wishful thinking. Nanotechnology might rebuild a mass of dead tissue into a mass of healthy tissue, but without a complete isomorphic model of the brain it will be impossible to return a mushy brain to the exact state it was in before death occurred.

…There is little reason to believe that the promises of cryonics will ever be fulfilled. Even if a dead body is somehow preserved for a century or two and then repaired, whatever is animated by whatever process will not be the same person who died. The brain is the key to consciousness and to who a person is. There is no reason to believe that a brain preserved by whatever means and restored to whatever state by nanobots will result in a consciousness that is in any way connected to the consciousness of the person who died two centuries earlier.http://www.skepdic.com/cryonics.html

It would take “…and then a miracle happens.” Impossible, I say.

Atom Smasher:
Having been formerly involved with the occult and magic arts, I have clearly seen that the spiritual realm is real and that we are not just a bunch of chemicals.

That is nonsense. If you have “seen” the spiritual realm then your mind has played a trick on you. There are people who experience near death experiences, the experience which convinces people "we are not just a bunch of chemicals", but it's simply a matter of biochemistry.

 

[Atom Smasher]

You have no clue whatsoever what you're talking about. You're making a blanket statement that something doesn't exist based solely on an absence of your own exposure to it. It can't possibly exist; after all, you've never experienced it, right?

You don't even know what my experiences are. Not a clue.

An intelligent man would say, "What kind of experiences have you had?", in order to obtain FACTS by which to formulate an opinion.

I guess you just "feel" the occult can't be real, eh?

I personally am skeptical of near death experiences, simply because I don't have enough information to form an opinion one way or another. First-hand anectotal accounts cannot be verified because of the probabability of the dream-state being involved, of course. A person can easily be dead-certain they went to heaven or floated above the table, and be dead-wrong. We can't know, and we can't even know if we experience it ourselves.

 

[Mr.Positive]

I personally am skeptical of near death experiences, simply because I don't have enough information to form an opinion one way or another. First-hand anectotal accounts cannot be verified because of the probabability of the dream-state being involved, of course.

Mixed feelings on this one. I think our minds can create things, or block things out, as well, as a way of coping. Much like the body goes into shock, physically, when major damage has been sustained.

I know that I saw a bright white light. A flash, that hid what was coming at me, my impending doom. Since I'm posting, I'm obviously still here, so this is why I think our minds can create/block things at the time of our calling.

 

[Deep Dish]

Atom Smasher:
You have no clue whatsoever what you’re talking about. You're making a blanket statement that something doesn’t exist based solely on an absence of your own exposure to it. It can't possibly exist; after all, you’ve never experienced it, right?

I do know what I am talking about. Not in the sense of the phrase of knowing your individual experience, but what science and reason speaks on the matter. Scientific experiments have established that people who are inclined to have paranormal experiences, like sensing ghosts and the occult, for example, have higher than average levels of dopamine, which causes you to perceive more patterns, but not so much dopamine as to be schizophrenic. So, I take the educated guess that truth be told you have more dopamine.

And not that this would apply to you, but experiments have also shown that the environment can cause hallucinations, by clusters of infrasound (which vibrates your eyeballs) and areas with high electromagnetic fields, with the intensity of hallucination mediated upon someone's biochemistry, probably dopamine. And then there's the phenomena of hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, which is experienced by one out of four people. The point is the brain is very deceptive towards your senses, and before you can reach for the extraordinary you must first rule out the ordinary. There is a thing in reasoning called inference to the best explanation, and this empirically grounded explanation is far more likely to be true than magical thinking.

To inform you on the science of near death experiences, the experiences are triggered by the blockage of the neurotransmitter glutamate by the six dollar word N-methyl-D-aspartate, which is a chemical cousin of ketamine, and are prevented with benzodiazepines. All of the elements of the experience are reproducible in experiments and by taking doses of ketamine. You don’t need to experience something yourself to assess its validity and the principle of parsimony, of simplicity, dictates that the simpler of two explanations is most likely to be true. In the words of the philosopher Rene Decartes, “When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.”

But supposing for a moment that if what you “saw” was not some hallucination caused by your biochemistry, I would dare you to take the $1 Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge as presented by the magician James Randi. If this “occult magic arts” is real then surely the results are reproducible. Simply demonstrate this in a controlled environment where the possibility of cheating has been removed and you will be $1 million all the happier, while revolutionizing the world and silencing skeptics. I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Deep Dish]

Oh yeah, and now that I've waxed poetic, what exactly was your experience, Atom Smasher?

 

[Alle_Gory]

What are the benifits of freezing a body when you die? I was at a party last night and this was one of the topics that came up. I think this topic is very interesting because when you die and you freeze your body, maybe in 200 years scientists will be able to make you alive again. Have you watched demolition man? thats what happened to Stallone and Wesley Snipes.

Current cryogenics are **** and give meat freezerburn. Freezerburn cannot be reversed and even if you could it would be extremely difficult. You have to freeze the body right the first time without that ice crystals forming in the meat and destroying it.

Like the japanese are doing with this crazy cells alive system. No freezer burn, perfect meat.

 

[Kerpal]

You could wake up in a lab 2,000 years from now having experiments done on you :nervous:

 

[bob2007]

What are the chances that they will want to resurrect u, instead of other people?

Is the real question. Would you ressurrect all the dead people of the past today? If they were cryogenically frozen?

 

[Alle_Gory]

You could wake up in a lab 2,000 years from now having experiments done on you :nervous:

Worth it.

 

[Atom Smasher]

Replied to the wrong poster.

Alle, please delete.