Yesterday I spoke of that cryonics gathering I recently attended, where travel by young cryonicists was fully subsidized, leading to extremely different demographics from conventions of self-funded activists. 34% female, half of those in couples, many couples with kids - THAT HAD BEEN SIGNED UP FOR CRYONICS FROM BIRTH LIKE A GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION WOULD REQUIRE - 25% computer industry, 25% scientists, 15% entertainment industry at a rough estimate, and in most ways seeming (for smart people) pretty damned normal.

Except for one thing.

During one conversation, I said something about there being no magic in our universe.

And an ordinary-seeming woman responded, "But there are still lots of things science doesn't understand, right?"

Sigh. We all know how this conversation is going to go, right?

So I wearily replied with my usual, "If I'm ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory -"

"Oh," she interrupted excitedly, "so the concept of 'magic' isn't even consistent, then!"

Click.

She got it, just like that.

This was someone else's description of how she got involved in cryonics, as best I can remember it, and it was pretty much typical for the younger generation:

"When I was a very young girl, I was watching TV, and I saw something about cryonics, and it made sense to me - I didn't want to die - so I asked my mother about it. She was very dismissive, but tried to explain what I'd seen; and we talked about some of the other things that can happen to you after you die, like burial or cremation, and it seemed to me like cryonics was better than that. So my mother laughed and said that if I still felt that way when I was older, she wouldn't object. Later, when I was older and signing up for cryonics, she objected."

Click.

It's... kinda frustrating, actually.

There are manifold bad objections to cryonics that can be raised and countered, but the core logic really is simple enough that there's nothing implausible about getting it when you're eight years old (eleven years old, in my case).

>>16706795 (OP)
Reminds me of all those maps the sailors used to have, where you go to far and you wind up in dark matter or fall off the edge of the Earth.

>>16706795 (OP)
So let me get this straight:
You attended a tech-funded rich-people death cult meetup where yuppie couples sign up their toddlers for speculative corpse freezing... and your biggest takeaway was a woman agreeing with you about a semantic quibble over "magic"?

This is peak Silicon Valley hubris. You’re not building a sane civilization — you’re running a philosophical daycare for people terrified of death and clinging to reductionism like it’s a security blanket.

Cryonics is astrology for atheists with disposable income.
But sure, tell us again how enlightened your frozen embryos are.

>>16706808
I sort of hope cryonics can be made workable (it can't) so that its adherents can be revived and immediately fed into the torment nexus. I'm so glad I'm going to die long before we invent the torment nexus.

>>16706795 (OP)
Why don't they freeze themselves now instead of later once the mesothelioma has damaged the rest of their body?

>>16706808
Wait until you hear about the rationalists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community

>>16706795 (OP)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-techies-wet-dreams

> The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased.[22] Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive;[23] consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens faster and faster, competition among self-propagating systems becomes more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on the basis of the techies' own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it's safe to say that the life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short. The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies aspire[24] is nothing but a pipe-dream.

>>16706851
>I sort of hope cryonics can be made workable (it can't) so that its adherents can be revived and immediately fed into the torment nexus.
Based.

>I'm so glad I'm going to die long before we invent the torment nexus.
I am doing my best so that you can both witness and experience it.