Medicine of Consciousness: Anti-Cryonics

If medicine is in the business of saving lives, it is the most catastrophically disaster-ridden endeavor in the human history - every single human being that has ever been born has died, medicine or not.

More realistically, medicine should be thought of as being in the business of managing the lower ends of the quality of consciousness. Treating disease is needed because it causes misery. Treating death may be counter-effective in this regard because death is the easiest, most efficient and permanent way of avoiding suffering.

Cryonics, the branch of medical science that uses cold to reduce metabolic activity in living tissue and thus slow down or stop the course of potential illness, usually in hopes of giving a patient time for a curative technology to be developed, is thus on dubious ethical ground. It is so because its effects on consciousness are identical to coma. While methods of inducing short-term coma can be useful, like in cases of severe pain and it being preferable for the patient to be unconscious rather than sedated for several weeks after major injuries, few, if any reasonable medical professionals would advocate inducing long-term coma in people, just to spare them living in this relatively more miserable time rather than some future time.

Cryonics, should the technology be pursued and developed, should not be used to induce stasis for longer than five years, or some other, arbitrary time limit. Here is why. Lets take an illustrative marginal case, a hypothetical situation in which the ultimate usefulness of cryonics would be shown and, ultimately, undermined. Imagine a patient who suffers from some sort of lethal disease which is as of yet incurable, but, luckily, due to recent developments, a reliable cure can be reasonably expected to be developed in five years' time. The patient is put in a cryonic stasis and promptly resuscitated 4 years and 8 months later, administered the cure and sent home saved from dying from that particular complication. So far, so good. 

Now, even if we assume the cure and the stasis to be trouble-(such as neurological degeneration, muscle atrophy, reduced quality of live due to incurable complications)-free, the patient is nevertheless like a coma-patient, he has been absent from the world for a considerable amount of time. Life has moved on, but he has been stuck, literally, frozen in time. It is reasonable to assume that the patient has no work, will lack crucial skills and knowledge about the new affairs of the world and, most importantly, it can be reasonable to expect that the patient's social ties with his family, let alone friends and acquaintances, will be severely disrupted. If the patient still has living parents, that would surely be a respite, but it is difficult to imagine how a spouse is supposed to have been behaving during the patient's absence. I cannot in earnest advocate and expect people to wait on long-term cryo-stasis patients to come back, much like long-term coma patients. Possible children would, reasonably, be even less understanding to such unique turn of events.

For all the saving of life, the on-board consciousness of cryonic-treatment patients would be done little service.

But what is the alternative, you might ask. Should we just sit around and do nothing while degenerative disease crushes people's well-being and ultimately takes their lives? What should we do with the possibly-not-brain-dead coma patients? I suppose the answer depends on what you happen to recognize as the prime ethical deliberation and meaning of life. I argue that the prime consideration is not of life, but of the quality of existence a consciousness can experience, should it be forced to begin to experience anything at all, a negative-utilitarian approach. I say, without callousness, that the coma patients should be allowed to expire. The degenerative disease patients should be allowed (nay, persuaded) to receive euthanasia. I am pro-death. These patients would not be harmed by being allowed to die. Where hurt would occur, however, is in the living. Ethical consideration for using cryonics extends thusly: can the patient's consciousness be expected to be more beneficial to other's after the resuscitation than the harm it will have to endure upon being prevented from ceasing? If the person who we consider to put in cryo-stasis is brilliant, we may need to ask them to remain alive that much longer.

Discuss!

"What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets!"

Today I was set to thought by a comment in a blog. It read: do you believe in the subconscious?

It is the wrong question. A more apt attempt at the core of the problem would be: "Is there evidence for activity in the human body, specifically, the brain, of which the person himself is not aware of?". And, yes, there is. LOTS! It is not a matter of faith, nor is there any ambiguity about the existence of the subconscious. 

It probably dates back to Freud and his theories on the human mind, retaining their attractiveness not only due to the groundbreaking first effort into psychoanalysis, but also due to sex being the focal point of referance. It seems odd to me, that the idea, that there could be "thoughts" in one's head that one is not aware of, would seem so peculiar. But perhaps I becomes clearer, if we hark back to the zeitgeist of ages past.

Since antiquity the dominant train of thought has been what modern thinkers call "phenomenological" i.e. it concerned itself specifically with world as experienced by human psyche, not world as experienced by an evolved homo sapiens body. This backwards analysis of reality lead to the assumption that human beings possess a "self" that is capable of change, yet fundamentally permanent, a Soul. And under the theory of souls being the source of selfhood and supposedly everything that constitutes a person, it was unthinkable that something might come out of the soul that the person himself was not aware of. Thus the stage was set for a dramatically unsympathetic worldview - people were thought to be the sole instigators of their actions. The brave and just were praised, the disturbed and failing were deemed to be lacking in their soul's fundamental qualities (faith for a considerable time, lately it's positivity).

Modern thought has come a long way to change all this. Where physics has laboured to rip man out of the centre of the universe, demonstrated he does not sit on an even remotely significant planet, which revolves an unimpressive star in a backwards galaxy made mostly of an insignificant type of matter in, possibly, one of countless non-unique universes, cognitive science (for far too long there have been "sciences") has made its business to illuminate the fact that humans don't have a singular self, are mostly oblivious to their inner goings-on, suffer countless afflictions of thought and are ultimately without free will. This might sound ironic, even cynical, but these discoveries are among the most hopeful in recent times. Where singular self is abolished, a true understanding of the flexibility of the human mind can be achieved. Where we recognize that we do not understand ourselves, we can begin to learn to observe what we are thinking. Where the human condition is understood not as a function of souls and demons, but as interaction between genetic and environmental factors, well-being can grow. Where there is no free will, compassion and love become the ultimate path.

With a bit of understanding the question about the subconscious becomes straightforward. The default state of consciousness in practically all life on Earth seems to be an absence of it. It is just in humans that the ability to monitor certain brain activity has evolved. And consciousness is just that - the evolved ability to have a thought "I'm having this thought." There is little basis to assume that this monitoring extends to all brain activity, quite the contrary, most brain activity never enters our scope of comprehension. It might even be surprising to find that the capacity to observe oneself's mind varies greatly between individuals. And the jury is still out on to what extent, if at all, this ability to monitor certain brain activity influences said activity, i.e. what is will.

I happen to think that humans are complex biological machines, devoid of ability to operate outside the software they have been installed, most of the time oblivious to this fact and clueless as to what their operating system is, with direct hotline to support services only a dreadful scam.

So, what is man? A miserable little pile of secrets, especially to himself.