The Girl With the Sun in Her Eyes

She leans forward in the sensible chair. Her voice is soft but earnest, and her gaze intent, as the questions cascade from her mouth. What can I tell her? What do I know? I do at least know that I don’t know, and perhaps I know something of another way of not knowing. ‘Curious minds like ours stay open to the new questions that emerge from our original ones,’ I venture. This probably isn’t helping. ‘I don’t mean that you shouldn’t ask those things. I just mean that it’s OK to find that they lead you to more and “better” questions instead of to fixed answers. What was there before there was time? I don’t know. But it’s good to ponder, because it leads to physical questions about the origins of time and the universe. Human brains process that universe in a way that gives rise to a sense of duration. It’s in here, not “out there”.’

‘You should talk to my son,’ she says. ‘I think you’d get along. He had cancer, but he’s recovering now. He gets down sometimes. I do too – or I used to. It’s better here. Sometimes I just sit awake in my bed for hours, thinking. They keep asking if I’m OK, but I’m fine. I’m just going through all this... stuff, in my head. Your book – I keep starting it, but then I get stuck with more...’

The musak has come back on, so I have to lean forward in my chair so that she can hear me. The easy-clean pad squeaks under me. One of my legs is going numb.

‘I used to stare at the sun,’ she says. Her eyes are quite... bloodshot. ‘I’d look at it for ages, and think I could see things there – like a sort of halo. I probably damaged my eyes – I can’t see a ball coming at me if someone throws one in my direction – but nobody told me I shouldn’t look at it.’

I agree that it probably did damage her eyes. She is remarkable.

‘This thing with your brain... your head. I’m not against it; I think it’s fascinating. But how do you...? How does it work?’ she asks.

‘Well, the brain is a physical thing. It’s made of atoms, like everything else. So I’m very curious to know whether it can be “put on hold” in some way. They idea of cryonics is to do that using ultra-cold temperatures to stop all chemical reactions – to stop all decay. It’s an experiment. It’s about potentialities – I’m trying to leave open the small possibility that some future technology might fix me and revive me,’ I explain.

‘The brain is amazing. I sometimes wonder if we have any idea how to use it properly,’ she says, smiling. Her hand smooths down the cover of the newly signed book.

‘I met Doris Stokes, you know. She came into the shop where I was working when I was young. You won’t believe any of this, but she told me a lot of things about my life that have turned out to be true.’

‘If you mean I don’t believe she could predict your future, you’re right,’ I say. ‘But I do find it fascinating that some people have that skill, that level of... empathy, where they can tune into other people and make guesses so good that they sound like they must be psychic.’

The Catholic priest two sensible chairs across the lounge from us raises his voice as he switches into formal prayer mode. Is this a competition? He is kneeling in front of one of the other residents, eyes tight shut, holding her hands.

Ruby is oblivious. We continue our catechism.

‘But Swein Macdonald said similar things. I met him too, much later, when I was married. He said there was something special about me. He said I’d be happy. And I am, now.’

‘I’ll bet he could see that you were curious, looking for something. A lot of people mistake that for some kind of “spirituality”,’ I say.

‘Oh, I go to the church service every week,’ she says.

‘Good entertainment?’ I ask.

‘Well... a lot of it just makes me angry.’

It makes me angry, too. These people are like vultures. Stupid fat head on white collar with his intrusive, empty words and contact. Leave. Her. Alone. ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Any notion of “God” is sort of “out of bounds” – there are no useful questions we can ask about a being who is supposed to exist “outside” of everything we can ask questions about, if you see what I mean. It’s a blind alley.’

‘When I was living up north – when I was married – my husband started to drink a lot. He beat me sometimes,’ she says.

With those red-ringed whites, I can’t tell whether she’s about to cry or not. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that, Ruby. I...’

‘I could take it, most of the time,’ she says. ‘I didn’t stop thinking. I suppose I was in a world of my own. Then, later, I was taking a lot of co-codamol, and that didn’t help.’ This without a hint of bitterness.

‘I hope you keep pondering things... keep thinking. I know it’s difficult for people. They think we’re being weird or awkward. But it’s how we are... how we make sense of things... not that there’s any ultimate sense to be made, of course.’

The musak is now a 60s/70s pop compilation. Telstar, I think, I used to have that somewhere. Odd tracks. Not like stuff they usually play in here.

‘Well,’ Ruby says, looking over her shoulder to where my wife is sitting with my mother-in-law, ‘I’m keeping you from the person you actually came to visit.’

‘Not at all,’ I assure her. ‘I’ve really enjoyed our chat.’ I stretch my numb legs and stand up.

‘So have I,’ Ruby says, rising slowly to her feet. ‘Thank you.’

Oh how she deserves another chance. Another crack at this thing. Why did nobody take the time to listen to her properly, to... nurture her?

She beams and blinks her two wide coronas at me before joining the shuffling, zimmering throng leaving this mortal lounge for the dining room, and the next scheduled meal break.

Cryonics: A Probability Greater Than Zero

Since the recent publication of Kim Suozzi’s story in The New York Times, interest in cryonics has spiked. This is hardly surprising, as Kim’s story is such a heart-rending one. It has evoked much polarised debate. I discuss Kim’s case briefly in my book Frozen to Life. Like me, Kim chose neuropreservation – technically, preservation of the brain, but in practice, preservation of the entire cephalon (head). Unlike me, she is now a de facto ‘cryonaut’ – a person actually cryopreserved. At Alcor’s facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, her head will remain indefinitely in a ‘neurocan’ inside a stainless-steel dewar, bathed in liquid nitrogen and monitored constantly by ‘crackphone’.

I know it sounds bizarre. ‘Cryonicists’ like me are well aware that the majority will find this process at very least distasteful. Some view it as nothing but a weird 21st-century burial practice, perhaps comparing it to Pharaonic embalming. Others see it as desecration of dead bodies. Most critics highlight cost, accusing Alcor and other cryonics organisations of swindling the vulnerable into parting with $80,000 plus for a chimera of immortality.

What the critics don’t come up with is an alternative. One consequence of sapience is that persons don’t want to die. What are we to do about this plangent cry for continued existence? Tell people to get back in their rotting-boxes?

Neuroscientist Ken Hayworth supports cryonics research but criticises Alcor’s preservation methods. His Brain Preservation Foundation is developing a new method – Aldehyde-Stabilised Cryopreservation (ASC) – involving use of glutaraldehye fixative to stabilise brain ultrastructures such as neurons and neurites by crosslinking proteins. ASC is aimed at preventing the osmotic dehydration, and consequent tissue shrinkage, seen in fixative-free cryopreservation methods.

Hayworth is involved in a heated debate with Alcor about cryopreservation techniques. This is science in action, and it is healthy. Less constructive is his criticism of Alcor’s financial model (suggestions from him on improvements to Alcor’s insurance-funded, non-profit set-up would be welcome). Hayworth understands the importance of trying to preserve brains, and to preserve them as best we can using the available technology. Poignantly, he compares destroying brains in the customary manners to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I take a similar line in Frozen to Life, where I ponder how future civilisations will look upon our wanton failure to preserve these most unique and irreplacable data stores. I find this behaviour crass and negligent.

But methodological debate aside, Hayworth and the cryonics organisations agree that brain ultrastructure preservation with a view to future data extraction – or even quickening – is a worthwhile pursuit. Seeing so much to gain, and the probability of success (at some time in the future by some future method) as greater than 0, they proceed with their immense endeavour.

Meanwhile, however, the zero-probabilists – including Michael Hendricks of McGill University – are industriously constructing not technical alternatives but absolute dismissals. Is he really saying that extraction of data from preserved brains in not, even in principle, possible? Not even a little bit? Not even with neurotechnologies centuries advanced from our own? His view is that cryonics is ‘a purposeful conflation of what is theoretically conceivable with what is ever practically possible.’

There is a vitalist tone to Hendricks’ piece. Neurophilosophy arose because scientists and thinkers found that philosophy and neurophysiology taken in isolation each failed to explain adequately the consequences and contradictions of consciousness. Hendricks might consider delving further into this field before pre-loading personal-identity-related questions like ‘What is this replica? Is it subjectively “you” or is it a new, separate being?’

As an Alcor member, I’m hardly an impartial observer of this debate. My plea is simply for intellectual rigour and empathy from both sides. I find current death customs crass, but I understand something of where they came from and why they matter to people. Absolute dismissals of the scientific efforts of cryonicists rankle, but I understand why scientists guard against ‘false hopes’ created by pseudo-scientific claims. As a non-scientist advocate of cryonics, I merely expect neuroscience researchers both supportive and critical of its claims to attempt their falsification. That is their job, after all. I think, in this way, we will eventually come to see cryonics at least as a pattern-storage technology, and certainly no longer as an adjunct to death rituals.

Probabilistically speaking, Kim’s chances may be infinitesimally small, but can you be absolutely sure that they’re precisely equal to 0?

Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment

For the last four years, I've been writing a book. Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment is about death, life, severed-head cryonics, Buddhism, love and philosophy of personal identity. People keep mistaking it for a fabrication, classifying it as fiction or science fiction. If you read it, something might happen to your mind. Something happened to mine while writing it.

Confessions of a Justified Brain-freezer

And so to cryonics.

I have posted about this before but now I think I am ready expand on that. Cryonics is emotive because it is to do with death and all things to do with death are emotive. Death-denial is perhaps the greatest (and most important) psychological game we play with ourselves throughout our short lives.

Once you get past religion (unless you wish to fool yourself) you are faced with the prospect of your own eventual non-existence in all its cold-gleaming, gut-wrenching starkness. Allow yourself to feel it for a while and then stop. Because there is nowhere to go. You can't rationalise it because there is no rationale to death for sentient beings like us. Your brain will cease to function and some well-meaning (but ultimately complicit) loved-one will put the remains of your unique molecular structure into the ground to rot, or burn them to ashes in a purpose-built oven.

Getting past religion (which happened to me around age 5) and much later discovering something of my physical composition, is not enough. The realisation that death is the end, is not the end of the realisation. Why be in such a hurry for your full-stop? Everything is made of atoms. When you die your body does not immediately fall into a heap of stinking slurry. You have a structure and there is some time available to store the most important part of that structure - your brain. You are your structure - your emotions, your memories, your personality - is all made of atomic structures. Why denegrate those who chose not to have it summarily burnt to ashes?

The more I think about this the more I feel that humanity is making a terrible mistake in the way it deals with death. How often have you heard "it's about those that are left behind"? No. Your death is about you. Granted, you are going to cause them some inconvenience in their time of greatest distress, by insisting that your remains be treated differently when you die. But those you leave behind will still exist as sentient beings in the universe, you will not. If they don't understand what that means then they still have the luxury of time to learn.

What we need are practical measures. Organ donation is now a well-established practice. We treat donated hearts and kidneys with the utmost respect. What about brains? You can't transplant them but does that imply that they should just be left to turn to soup? Why not cool all dead bodies, where possible? This could be implemented in hospitals. There would be a cool-room where all dead bodies would be taken. The cooling would help to delay the degradation of all organs, making more of them available and viable for transplantation. Those seeking cryonic preservation (neuropreservation) of their heads (and bodies if necessary) could be readily catered for. Organisations such as Alcor could collect from the hospitals and put the heads into long-term liquid nitrogen storage.

The above may sound unpalatable to you but what do you care? You will be dead. Does this process lack dignity? What could one possibly mean by that? How about some dignity of structure? Some respect for beautiful cellular architecture?

But this costs money, right? It is expensive because it is a relatively new idea and novelty costs money. Even now cryonics is not prohibitively expensive and it is likely that the price will come down rapidly as more people request it. Remember that when cryonics first appeared in the 1960s most people still had no idea that the entirety of their "self" was composed of physical structures within their brains. We now know this to be true and more people will realise it over time, so it is logical to assume that more and more people will choose cryonics as a result of this.

Do I expect to be 'woken up' from death at some point? No, of course I don't expect it. The chances of it happening are infinitesimally small. But those of us who are used to reading about science and technology quickly develop an ability to 'project forward'. We are cynical about bad science, and bad reporting of science, but also optimistic about the possibilities. We can look at the endless possibilities in terms of probabilities. Is it probable that future civilisations will consider death to be an inconvenience? Is it probable that they will try to do something about it? Is it probable that they would be interested that others before them had tried to do something about it? Is it probable that they might be interested in using their advanced medical knowledge to tinker around with some vitrified heads in canisters in Arizona? Is it probable that, at some point, they might succeed in reviving one? The probabilities get smaller the further down this line of reasoning you go, but they never reach zero.

My thought processes simply don't allow me to think of death in the way that I used to. That will be uncomfortable for some people. I'm not interested in 'moral' arguments against cryonics, as I have never heard one with any substance. I am interested in the scientific arguments, as they are healthy and useful. The distaste for cryonics within religious circles is obvious and to be expected. That is satisfying to know. But, for those of us able to think clearly about death there is no excuse for summarily dismissing the idea.

I have never met anyone who truly accepts the notion of their own eventual death. I have met plenty of people who just shut the subject down, or dismiss it as inevitable and unchangeable.

That is probably true. But only probably.