Hedging about the afterlife
Cryonics feels like religion to me, and I don't know how to be religious
In early 2021, I wrote the cryonics signup sequence, which involved going through the process myself, while helping my sister and one of my roommates do the same. So, I am almost all the way signed up for cryonics. I pay my monthly life insurance fees and my annual Alcor dues. I’m on file as an Alcor member. But I never completed the last step in the process and received my tags.
Why? Did I just run out of steam at the last minute and develop an aversion to this annoying bureaucratic step?
I used to think so. I no longer do. Procrastination is not just something to be fought, it’s something to be understood.
I started writing the cryonics sequence not as a dedicated cryonicist (as many people assume from the fact that I wrote a 20,000 word sequence on cryonics), but as someone exploring the whole thing, basically for the first time. I thought it was the kind of thing I shouldn’t just not do out of inertia, or out of not knowing how. It was Covid times, so we had all recently learned the value of exploring possibilities that seemed outlandish.
When I was deep in my research, I read an article by a cryonicist journalist who accompanied the Alcor team for a preservation. She said she usually hates ambulances because she’s terrified of death, but that it didn’t feel so bad this time because “I knew we’d see him again in the future”. Like he wasn’t really dying.
That has stuck with me for five years. This woman using cryonics as a transparent stand-in for religion, under the thin veneer of science.
When I was six, two family friends, a mother and a daughter, died of unrelated causes on the same day. This was scary, but I had known they were both sick in their own ways, and we had a memorial, and I felt closure.
Then one day at school, about a year later, my teacher had to sit down my whole class of seven-year-olds and tell us that one of the school staff, who we had just seen last week, had suddenly had a brain aneurysm and died the night before.
This broke me. Not right away – some of my classmates started crying, and I took on the role of comforting them. But that night I started sobbing in my mom’s bed. For weeks, every night I didn’t want my mom to turn off the light and leave me, because I was worried one of us would die in the night, or just because I couldn’t bear the thought that one day she would die and so would I. I developed contamination OCD for about a year, a futile way of trying to feel like I had control over something. When my mom would go out in the car and be a few minutes late returning, I would spend the time consumed with anxiety that she had been in a car accident. A young person having a brain aneurysm was a harsh way to learn that death can come for anyone at any time.
Sometimes, when I was in the throes of my terror of death, my mom would suggest that I try religion. She was extremely atheist after rejecting her Catholic upbringing, and she raised me the same. I tried to imagine what it would even be like to believe in a god and an afterlife, because it did seem like it would be comforting. It was a complete nonstarter.
But then, cryonics. A way to couch the idea of the afterlife in science and probabilities. I wanted to believe, of course I did. Don’t we all? Wouldn’t it be lovely if all my friends with silver bracelets never had to die? If I never had to die?
When I tried to believe in an afterlife as a child, I failed. I had no idea how to even start. And despite all the smart people who have tried to convince me otherwise, I have the same problem with cryonics.
After all my research, I do not believe in cryonics. I’m not claiming any particular probability there. Whatever my probabilities are for successful revival, they’re too low for me to feel them as anything besides zero. But that’s not really the point, it turns out. I don’t even know what it would mean for cryonics to be successful. I suppose when I imagine being revived, it is not in the world I love, not in the body I love, not with the people I love. It’s hard to imagine continuity of consciousness. I don’t even know what the exact problem is - the whole vision just falls apart. There is no vision.
Of course I am terrified of death, and do not want myself or the people I care about to die. Other people who feel that way tell me that cryonics is worth it to raise my chance at life after death from a cold, hard zero, to that infinitesimal probability that I cannot feel.
But worth what? I spend a few thousand dollars a year on being signed up for cryonics. Is any probability, no matter how many zeroes come after the decimal point, worth an unbounded amount of money?
I just said I am signed up for cryonics. Of course, except that last step. I figure, if I died suddenly under preservable conditions, I’ve done enough of the process that it would be pretty easy for the rest to come together. The step I haven’t done is mostly a formality. I could leave that final decision in the hands of people I know who have already put in heroic effort before to preserve dying friends. I’ve made it easy for them to make the decision for me that I already know they’d make, because they love me and they believe in cryonics more than I know how to.
So that’s how I’m hedging. Cryonics hardly feels on any firmer ground to me than does any other attempt at reaching an afterlife. But I still pay my thousands of dollars a year, because I’m too afraid of death not to still, a little bit, hope for it.