Above Death: Why Cryonics Makes Us Rethink The Meaning Of Time
Thinking about life and death is often in relation to a finite ticking clock, counting down our time left. Our war against death frames death as no longer something that happens at the end of life, but now increasingly dominant in our actions from the start and throughout life in the form of medicine. Death is framed as something that can be fixed by ‘doing’ something about it; A narrative in which the current economy, which relies on the pharmaceutical industry, must frame death as the enemy.
As humans we believe ourselves ‘above’ death, controllers of nature. The need for healthy eating, cutting alcohol and cigarette consumption, tracking symptoms, all aim to minimise chances of dying. This can lead to a life lived in prognosis for some patients, living on the hope of 5% chance of living 10 more years, this sense of time permeates the present in anticipation of future life. Our lives are punctuated with key events: birth, first tooth, first steps, starting school, first job, marriage, children, retirement. Milestones give our lives purpose, but many feel there’s just not enough time, or a sense of time running out. That’s where cryonics comes in. A ‘post-human’ science where upon an expected death (like cancer, rather than a car crash), the body is frozen rapidly in liquid nitrogen to prevent damage caused by death, in the hope that sometime in the future medical science will advance enough to reanimate them. Wherever you stand on the rights, wrongs, or possibility of such a procedure, it gives us some interesting questions about our understanding of time and life itself.
The full original academic essay is available here.
Anticipation of an uncertain future
Cryonics is an industry that exists entirely on an imaginary future. Firstly, while the patient may die today of something incurable, they will be reanimated in an imagined future that has a cure, not only from death but their disease, and even the possibility to sustain their life indefinitely.
One concern is that on reanimation the patient will be in a world beyond the time of their friends and family’s lives (if they didn’t also opt for cryopreservation), therefore their life may be significantly less enjoyable. For some, the chance at any life is better than no life.
Cryopreservation is apparently adept at preparation, on-hand immediately after death, yet has been criticised for its lack of foresight of other traumas. For instance, socio-political barriers like the Government of the time deciding against the reanimation or hosting refugees of time, of ecological disasters causing system failure and the defrost and death of patients. Patients are aware of potential risks, yet some still choose the small hope it might work over the many possible barriers.
While vaccines are a regime to prevent illness, cryonics is a regime to prevent death, since science declares it not an inevitable condition. Life extension becomes a regime already being fulfilled, with three years added to lifespan every decade, therefore the cryonics regime becomes an extension of this, helping those expecting death in the near future wait until lifespan continues to rise.
However, this is a regime seen as unethical upon those it ‘steals’ resources from. Cryonics can cost anywhere from $8,000 to $200,000, money which some argue is taken from the inheritance of those alive and able to benefit from it. If reanimation didn’t work, the money would be ‘wasted’ and lost, thus the sense of injustice for those alive in present because of the patient’s vision of their possible future. ‘If’ it did work, however, cryonic suspension is just an interruption to their life, like a coma, thus no-one would justify a claim on inheritance while someone is alive.
Life in indefinite stasis
Living in a temporality of the future, anticipating what it may become and implementing preparations based on time in prognosis, is evident for those opting for cryonic suspension. However, in the suspension of cryonics itself, time takes on a different shape; frozen but also moving on.
Frozen, waiting, suspended, time-travelling, missing lifetimes; these are all associated with the state in which a patient is in while under cryonic suspension.
But the million-dollar question is, does the patient experience time at all? According to the thermo-dynamic time of physics, time is characterised by movement and change, the decay of cells, the expansion of the universe. However, under cryonic suspension, the 6-minutes the body takes to reach final cell death is slowed to a speed longer than the predicted life of the universe. If change is key to time, then the patient does not experience time.
Psychological time is more complex. Think about the last time you went to sleep and you’ll realise that it just doesn’t feel like you closed your eyes then opened them one second later when you wake up (at least it doesn’t to me). Your subconscious is aware of time passing. However, cryonic preservation means freezing brain activity. Without brain activity, the patient cannot perceive time. If they were reanimated, they would experience a time gap, a period of time where not only do they have no awareness of, they also awaken possibly with no existing bank accounts, contracts, home, family, no awareness of present-day customs and culture. It will be as if they were born again. Time that existed while they were suspended will be like history before our birth is imagined.
Their psychological time may be disrupted in a disorienting way that is not the same as our current relation to time periods we did not live through, since our birth today is the beginning, while a reanimated patient’s ‘birth’ is a return after a gap in psychological time. We cannot know the consequences or the trauma of such an experience, hence the discussion of ethics relating to reanimation. As our only experience of time is linear and undisrupted, it is all we know, therefore reawakening from suspension would begin a new relation and understanding of time and our experience of it.
The only way to consider this perception of time is to look at accounts of people who died and came back to life, since they did not exceed to 6-minute time it takes for total death and neither do cryopreserved patients. Those describing their experience of time in these final minutes describe “nothing” and “no sense of time” as well as having no memories. Rather than simply slowing or stopping, in this state time doesn’t exist. With such an experience of non-existent time, any ‘gap’ in time is a cultural or materialistic relation to the world rather than a psychological gap, since passing of time is not experienced in such state.
Relation to life, time and the moving world
In what is often considered a way of coping with the anxiety of what happens after death, religious thought has imagined heavens and hells and reincarnations that depict consciousness transcending the body after death and enjoying immortality. Cryonics is marketed at a secular group of society who believe death to be a finite end to consciousness, cryonics then is a science-based chance at an afterlife. This creates a tension between accepting the finite time of (secular) death or starving it off with new sciences. To deny such innovation would be a stance towards accepting and choosing a finite lifespan.
Is there a “right” length of life? Is 80 or 90 years “enough” time to do everything there is to do? A human life is barely a blink in the history of the universe causing it to lose meaning and a sense of purpose, but life and time extension increases meaning through extended time in history.
Medicine and science have shaped human relation to mortality; death once bestowed by a dark cloaked figure is now known to be caused by disease. Medicine, and cryonics, become the mediator between life and death, and thus affect our relation to mortality and finite time. Both medicine and cryonics offer more time, even if it is not infinite time.
“Being frozen is the second worst thing that can happen to you” says Cryonic’s Institute’s founder, it is so because death in secular societies is finite and irreversible, while cryonics is unknown but offers more hope than finality. Fighting death becomes the meaning of life, and thus the meaning of time alive.
How could the future look?
If cryopreserve someday works, or medical advances provide medicines to boost longevity and lifespan, then society faces new questions about time.
Our expectations of reasonable timeframes for events, like marriage and children, would be significantly changed. The age of marriage and having children has shifted over the years as lives have got longer due to medicine and societal changes, so would continue to move onwards in life if medicine allowed women to have children later in their life. The prospect of hundreds of years of marriage, many different careers and more economic mobility would have radical effects on our perception of symbolic markers in our life. In a recent study, participants who were convinced of the possibility of life extension showed more concern over protecting their safety and punishing social transgressors more harshly. With longer lifespans, we may live less carelessly and likely require increased law enforcement, with life being perceived as more valuable if hundreds of years were on the table, not just 80.
To finish on a final profound question, how would our value systems hold up, if for instance those of 100 years ago started to come back, mixed with those 50 years ago, and 20 years ago? Would progressions in equality take a hit? How would newly awakened citizens adjust to the new world and its different values? Could we see new wars, terrorist groups and anti-X groups?
There are people waiting in cryonic preservation for this new world. It’s important to consider how our understanding of time, time periods, and life itself may shift when entering a world post-death.
