CryoNet #32254 - #32258

CryoNet - Sun 27 Dec 2009

    #32254: Re: social identity and well being [David Stodolsky]
    #32255: Religion as a coping mechanism [Robin Helweg-Larsen]
    #32256: "It's 2010" [Mark Plus]
    #32257: Rebranding cryonics [Mark Plus]
    #32258: Re: Rebranding cryonics [Finance Department]

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Message #32254
From: David Stodolsky <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: social identity and well being
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:42:39 +0100
References: <[email protected]>

On 23 Dec 2009, at 11:00 AM, CryoNet wrote:

> I have, without any justification
> what-so-ever, thought that those of us with very strong and well  
> integrated
> ego's might be able to hold our sense of self in these conditions  
> and get on
> with the task of learning how to adapt to our new and novel  
> circumstances.
> This might not be the case, as the article referenced by David,
> http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121596786/abstract, would  
> seem to
> suggest. If we are  likely to not be able to find a sense of well- 
> being, and
> perhaps not able to create the ego strength to undergo the rigors of  
> the new
> tasks in front of us, we  may not fully come to our selves. It may  
> be that
> we are well advised to bring along as many memento's of past community
> connections as we can via pics, sound files, video clips, etc. to  
> assist our
> re-integration into the new communities in which we find ourselves.


The main point of social identity theory is that individual identity  
is a result of a group processes, to a large extent. The idea of the  
unitary self has serious limitations. For example:

In "Extending the Human Life Span: An Exploratory Study of Pro- and  
Anti-Longevity Attitudes" Kogan et al. (in review; 9) concluded:

Benefits from life extension are believed to extend across the  
individual, interpersonal and societal levels. At the individual  
level, longevity is presumed to allow more time to achieve goals. At  
the interpersonal level, the long-term quality of relationships would  
presumably improve. At the societal level, greater wisdom and prestige  
accorded older people are presumed likely to ensue from enhanced  
longevity.


The kinds of memory support mentioned could be helpful, but they don't  
address the real needs of maintaining the interpersonal self. For  
this, you need continuing social relationships. This is one reason  
that Badger (1998) found that alienation from family and friends was  
identified as an issue in choosing cryonics.

In Ethical, social, and personal implications of extended human  
lifespan identified by members of the public (Rejuvenation Research;  
12:351-7.) Partridge et al. (2009c; 356) concluded, "The most often- 
cited potential downsides included the possibility of . out-living  
family and friends, thereby reflecting the same themes of ... family  
as the most important benefits.


These considerations are the basis for my conclusion that the cryonics  
movement should develop a marketing approach that facilitates the  
enrollment of groups of people, as a unit, in suspension programs.

In the issue of Applied Psychology "Social Identity, Health and Well- 
Being" the main thrust is on how social relationships are crucial to  
health and longevity. Therefore, an approach of enrolling groups also  
has the effect of keeping people alive longer. If we compare countries  
with the best and worse social conditions, we find that there is three  
times greater life-span in the best countries. There are real  
longevity gains to be achieved through a social strategy for life- 
extension.



dss



PS: These are complex issues and just reading an abstract or a  
quotation doesn't give much of an understanding, unless you are  
already familiar with the field.



David Stodolsky
[email protected]  Skype: davidstodolsky

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Message #32255
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:52:14 -0500
From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <[email protected]>
Subject: Religion as a coping mechanism
References: <[email protected]>

The danger that I see is that, as indefinite life extension and then 
physical rejuvenation become available to some but not all people, there 
could be a massive upsurge in fundamentalist extremism within all 
religions, making common cause against secularism and transhumanism in 
particular.

> popular religion is usually a superficial and flexible psychological 
> mechanism for coping with the high levels of stress and anxiety 
> produced by sufficiently dysfunctional social and especially economic 
> environments.
The US is in the forefront of allowing social experimentation. 
Conversely, it lags in providing social protection. Cryonics, being 
experimental, has benefited from US conditions to date; but in the 
future we may need more protection from violence and extremism than the 
US affords.

Long-term strategy should include plans for possibly moving cryonics 
patients to more receptive and/or more isolated locations. Isolated 
islands of Scandinavia, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Bahamas 
come to mind.

Robin Helweg-Larsen

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Message #32256
From: Mark Plus <[email protected]>
Subject: "It's 2010"
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 12:48:13 -0800

Introductory paragraphs:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/27/its_2010?mode=PF

It's 2010

Ready to communicate with dolphins? Take a spin in your flying car? Unfortunately, the future doesn't always turn out as predicted.

By Paul Milo  |  December 27, 2009

With just days left in the year, you might be trying out a few cool things you expect to use in 2010 - an e-reader, a talking GPS system, mittens wired to run your iPod. But it's a fair bet that there are some things you won't have. You won't have an electric butler to rouse you on New Year's Day. You won't climb into your flying car that morning. You won't be chowing down on your food pill for a recuperative breakfast. It's likely to be chilly - miserable, even - thanks to the lack of a climate-controlled geodesic dome over your town. And while you may be planning a Vermont ski trip for February, you're not going to be jetting to a Malaysian beach for the day, or relaxing at an orbiting space hotel.

If you had told this to an audience in 1930, or even 1970, they would have been shocked. Decades ago, it was virtually taken for granted that average people would regularly be traveling to space, robots would be doing all the household chores, and our steaks would be in capsule form. Even the most pessimistic folks would have guessed that by now we would be able to fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo in two hours.

The world we're about to enter, in 2010, may be radically more advanced, technologically, than a generation ago - just this month, a British firm began selling the first prosthetic bionic fingers, for instance - but it is still a far cry from the future as it was once imagined. And the reasons why we didn't get that future - why we have pocket phones that hold a thousand books, but can't buy a simple jetpack no matter how hard we look - suggest some important insights about why we predict the things we do and why when we try to predict tomorrow, we sometimes get things so laughably wrong.

[the rest at the link]

Mark Plus

 		 	   		  
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Message #32257
From: Mark Plus <[email protected]>
Subject: Rebranding cryonics
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:59:05 -0800

The paleofuture literature tends to treat cryonics as a product of bad futurology from the mid 20th Century. How do we rebrand cryonics so that people begin to associate it with the world of iPhones and Kindles instead of the world of flying cars and jetpacks?

Mark Plus




 		 	   		  
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Message #32258
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 01:33:34 -0500
Subject: Re: Rebranding cryonics
From: Finance Department <[email protected]>

--001636e0a7a9d75b83047baff7cb

The answer to how to rebrand cryonics seems to be as simple as demonstrating
that it works, like an iPhone does, or a Kindle.

Actually, jetpacks work to some extent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_pack

Flying cars do too:  http://www.moller.com/

Cryonics, unfortunately, has yet to be shown to work at all. It is a
surprise to me if it is anywhere on the futurology scale.  Someone was too
generous in assessing it.  On a scale of 0 to 1000 it must occupy the
position of 0. or perhaps as a notation in the margin.

Cheers,

FD

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