I suggest a choice among the following terms:
"Happy Sleep" (positive and uplifting)
"Pseudodead" (an unHappy medium)
"Cryoslumber" (taking a page from conventional funerology)
"Undead" (nasty vampish connotation, however--though with Noni as
Minavamp, you might want to count me in)
"Popsicle" (implying that, while presently frozen, the stiff may be
thawed and enjoyed at some future time; doubly effective when
freezing Dad)
jm
On 24 Apr 2001, at 1:05, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> I have to say that I think <ischemia> is one of the less effective memes
> I've run across lately. Cryonics patients are DEAD. Adapting to the
> future consists of recognizing that death is not necessarily
> irreversible. The euphemisms are not fooling anyone and I think it sounds
> darn stupid, like wearing a sign that says "Hi, I'm in denial" or "Hi,
> this is a cult". I know that this is exactly the same (false) accusation
> made about a great many pieces of new terminology, including, say,
> "Singularity" - I just happen to think that "ischemia", out of all the
> terms in the transhumanist glossary, happens to actually *be* that lousy.
> I would suggest calling them "reversibly dead" patients, which
> simultaneously conveys that you have indeed emotionally accepted how much
> damage has occurred, while carrying the future shock of the belief that
> even *that* much damage is still reversible.
>
> Saying that Alcor has sixty (or whatever) "reversibly dead patients" is,
> in itself, a powerful sign that cryonics is not cultish or denial or an
> Egyptian mummification sham. Religions insist that mummies et cetera are
> not "dead" in order to avoid the emotional fallout of accepting the fact
> of death. Saying that Alcor has sixty people in "ischemic coma" or
> "temporal transport" sounds like the service Alcor is providing is the
> ability for grieving relatives to deny that death has occurred, not
> actually saving lives. Again, I think that adequate neural information is
> preserved even without the new vitrification protocols, and that a lot of
> cryonics patients are quite possibly coming back post-Singularity, but I
> still have a tremendously bad impression of most current cryonics
> literature.
>
> No religion would ever call its mummies "reversibly dead". The term
> carries with it a visceral shock that instantly sets cryonics apart from
> the known human fallacy of denying death. "Ischemia" and similar terms
> are instantly, and correctly, processed as bureaucratese at the least and
> religious dogma at the worst. I strongly recommend that you drop
> "ischemia" and "temporal transport" in favor of "cryonic suspension" or,
> better yet, "reversibly dead".
>
> -- -- -- -- --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
>
John Marlow
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