06aug2002: Two things have solidified
into certainty for me in recent weeks. A need to propagate my genes,
and a desire to cheat death.
The gene-propagation thing will be taken
care of by the sperm donations, but in the last fourteen days something
else has arisen: I've understood what death means. Not just knowing what
it is, but feeling it, finally realising deep in my heart and bones that
one day I am not going to be around. My consciousness will no longer be
part of the world; I will no longer experience the intelligence and culture
of the value we've created within this physical reality of ours. I will
be gone.
Well, screw that.
I've decided
I'm not having anything to do with it. The UK now has several cryonic-preservation
facilities (one of them, surprisingly, less than five minutes' ride from
my home), and I'm signing up with one of them in September.
Yes - cryonics. Freezing your body (or just your head, if you've taken the
economy plan) in liquid nitrogen for later revival.
I'm under
no illusions here, having met many cryonics subscribers (pre-freezing -
they tend to become poor conversationalists later on) in years past. A few
things to understand: first and foremost, cryonics doesn't bring you back
to life, or cure you of whatever you died of. It just preserves everything
that makes you 'you' - the structure of your cells, how all those neurons
and synapses connect up. And if you can preserve that structure, there's
a chance it could one day be restarted. (I almost wrote 'rebooted', but
that'd be wrong. The right metaphors here aren't from computer science.)
The definition of death used to be when you stopped moving.
Then when your heart stopped beating. Now, it's when electrical activity
in your brain stops. But the states and weights of your neural structure
are exactly the same one second after death as they were a second before
in life, assuming you haven't died by massive trauma that destroyed your
brain's structure. (If that happens, you really are irrecoverable: everything
that made you 'you' has gone.) In fifty years, perhaps the definition will
change again: death only arrives when your neural structure's atrophied
beyond usefulness. And even at room temperature, it's around ten hours before
neural decay in a human body sets in.
The point is, there's
a chance - a chance that gets better the longer you're in the tank. So when
my time comes, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed inside my stainless-steel
tomb while I sleep away dreamless years. Hope will remain, down there in
the cold embrace of death.
