Is cryonics evil because it's cold?

It's interesting, because I don't feel negatively about cryonics (and back when I did I don't think it had to do with coldness), but when you suggested the normal-temperature equivalent I got a very different mental image.

That person, the one at room temperature who can be brought back later, is sleeping.

Meanwhile, cryo-related mental images are all science-fictiony. I'm thinking of Fry from Futurama and the Ancient lady in Stargate SG-1 and so on. I have examples of those readily available to my pattern-matching software (I imagine most people in the general population aren't as familiar with this sort of media) and I can think of the previously frozen persons walking around lucid and alive.

But they weren't sleeping. And sleep is so harmless, so inviting.

Edit: "Room temperature" should really have been "body temperature". But the distinction seems relatively small in my mind. I think the key is that you can touch somebody who's body temperature or room temperature, if you want. You can go pat them on the head or hold their hand. You can't do that with someone frozen.

I'd expect more interest among your group A, but for a different reason: It doesn't specify a method, and therefore carries more of an implicit assumption that it works. You can object to B by saying "freezing probably wouldn't work", but objecting to A by saying "suspension probably wouldn't work" feels like denying the premise of the "if".

In vitro fertilisation involves similar cold, used to preserve actual embryos intended to grow up into real life humans. As does freezing sperm. No-one bats an eyelid; I'd suggest because these technologies work pretty well.

There are many complicated ethical questions surrounding both the freezing of sperm and the freezing of embryos, but these questions arise because the technologies do in fact work pretty well, therefore have to be taken seriously.

This suggests "cold is evil" is not a factor.

Related to: Cryonics is Very Far.

Sounds plausible.

You say cryonics uses vitrification. Is that true? I thought people want to use vitrification, not that they'd figured out how to avoid freezing.

most people assume it does because they only know about cryonics — er, I mean, “cryogenics” — from Austin Powers and Futurama and Batman and other popular fiction where it’s either a comedic trope or a villainous thing the villain does

Changing society is a villainous thing the villain does. Being smart is a villainous thing the villain does. The superhero/villain trope reveals a deep prejudice against thought.

I've been thinking about this lately and I think you are probably right.

One way to improve the situation without changing the technical procedure is to emphasize vitrification as the important step in preservation -- turning the body into glass.

I feel like glassiness trumps coldness. If you're already glass, then you aren't able to feel cold. (Yes, I know that rationally being dead also trumps coldness)

Cold Hearted Immortality and Cryonics: from Voldemort to Mr. Freeze

I don't think it is that simple. Medical procedures involve all kinds of evil sounding actions. Cutting someone open, changing blood, replacing hearts, amputating and what not. Medicine has a generally decent public image, and they get away with whatever they think helps.

My impression is that death is considered something very natural and trying to avoid it is EVIL. Medication is fine,but trying to actually, consciously life longer than one is SUPPOSED TO is bad. If you look at fiction that is usually what you get. Biological life forms in SF are very happy to just life the amount of time they get, without any try to change it. Also average lifespan is often treated as the lifespan everyone gets. In reality humans have their 80 years, but some make it to 110+ (http://grg.org/Adams/E.HTM) while others fade with 50.But there is no public outcry about that. It is accepted and/or ignored.

I noticed how few people take conscious action to reduce risk factors. Being dead just does not factor in at any point. There is the whole notion of living short, but eventful vs. long and boring.

My bet is that a procedure at room temperature, or involving heating the patient up would get the very same ugh-reactions as cryonics gets. The reaction is independent of the concrete procedure, or its chances of actually working.

In terms of emotional response, I do feel better about room temperature. Vitrification?

I'm not sure how much this is negative connotations with cold, and how much is that room temperature (or ordinary air temperature) says "storage" to me, and requiring extreme cold says "fragile, unreliable, drastic".

I don't think this theory holds water. The main problem with cryonics from the mainstream point of view is the fundamental issue of the respect for the dead and the proper acceptance of death. From the point of view of an average person, holding corpses submerged in a liquid with the hope of future revival is equally perverse regardless of whether this liquid has to be held at very low temperatures.

(That alternet.org article you linked to is an amusing example of lefties trying to come to terms with something that's altogether outside of their purview. It's not something they can dismiss as traditional religious superstition, and their incapacity to understand it is an indication of their own falling behind the times, so they're forced to dig for ways to throw cheap and irrelevant shots. What an amusing display of human folly.)

At first I thought vitalistic thinking plays a role in this repugnance. However:

People don't seem to have that sort of yuck reaction when it comes to freezing human sperm cells or eggs, or storing frozen human embryos and then later reviving them to resume their normal development in a woman's womb. Nobody I know of calls the babies produced from previously frozen cells zombies.

And they certainly don't object to eating frozen foods, either ones like ice cream, or ones they have to heat up first. If cryonics offends the hominin brain because freezing somehow deprives biomass of its mythical "life principle," then why doesn't it also do that to food (depriving it of its life-sustaining value) and embryos (depriving them of souls)?

I suspect I would have more of an instinctive aversion to the word 'thawed' than 'frozen'. I've never really trusted thawing.