Lies we tell children
How many things seem truly certain? Death? Taxes?
The hardest ideas to challenge are the ones so encompassing that we cannot notice them1. For all of human history, death has been feared and minimally understood. Cryonics challenges the most fundamental belief; we’re all going to die and the world will proceed into a future filled with people we’ll never meet and cool toys we’ll never play with.
We shouldn’t lie to children about Santa Claus2.
Hear me out for a moment, even if I am neither a Christian nor a parent.
For reasons both evolutionary and otherwise, children think everything is relevant. Therefore, conspiracies perpetrated by adults are tremendously impactful. Unquestioning obedience of the parent who warns of a cliff you should avoid or a poisonous berry you shouldn’t eat or a rival tribe whose territory is off-limits is an excellent survival mechanism. It also encodes gullibility at the genetic level. This is a good thing for a species.
However, it’s a horrible reality when played upon by wiser adults. Ultimately, the wool is removed from the eyes, the veil is pierced, and the reveal shakes the child’s core. Trust is now forever limited. The obvious follow-up from the internal monologue is:
“What else are you lying about?”
Of course, as a species, we’re still grappling with a similarly startling revelation. For most human history, magic3 was real. The discovery of the scientific method as an alternative means of understanding and explaining is extremely new for the species. Therefore, our genetically-encoded gullibility and predilection for magic permeates our thinking about ideas still beyond the boundaries of our understanding.
We still don’t know much about the hard problem of consciousness or how quantum mechanics allows for free will. We don’t know much about the nature of reality, as evidenced by the fact that credible scientists debate whether or not we are living in a simulation (or on the back of a giant turtle). We still cannot really explain why we all perceive ourselves as having free will despite the laws of physics that tell us there’s determinism, randomness, and not much else. For these reasons and others, being conditioned to accept certain aspects of existence is probably a good thing4.
Death is also on the list of things we do not fully understand, but are conditioned to accept. From ancient mythology to Harry Potter, the villain is always the character trying to cheat death. Not accepting death is very bad indeed.
Our own brains are a mystery to us. We assume they possess the nature of the most complicated devices humans can construct. Once, brains were like clocks. Now, they are like computers, and we build artificial neural networks in attempts to model and understand. We know awfully little, but nonetheless, we know that death is inevitable. We also, at least in the scientific realm, know that our consciousness dies when we do. Scientific efforts to locate a soul have not been fruitful.
How much of this is cultural conditioning to deal with yet another thing that doesn’t make sense? We don’t even know what a good life entails, but we’re confident about the nature of death?
Archeological analysis of our male ancestors shows that many5 of them died of blunt force trauma to the head. Many of our female ancestors perished in childbirth. The nature and causes of living and dying change rapidly. Why do we suspect that current causes of death will not be largely eliminated in future centuries?
Cryonics offers the ability to rethink another truism conveyed to unquestioning children. What if death needn’t be permanent? What if our consciousness can be transplanted into another, less fallible medium? This raises questions about the continuity of self. After all, we believe today that our identities are retained even as days pass, cells die, and new replacements appear6. What if death is not the end, but passage to the next level of the video game, where we gain new abilities? Too far-fetched? We gain capacities in utero…why not in silico?
Perhaps the probability that cryonic technology works as intended is low today. How many years will elapse between today and your death? What other technological gains have occurred in similar periods? What probability of altering the nature of mortality would be required for you to revisit your certainty about death?
What if the inevitable permanence of death is just another lie told to children?
1
Famously, the parable of the fish that does not realize it swims in water and the graduation speech it sparked.
2
We tell children many lies - and this is not ideal.
3
Manifesting as superstitions, unnecessary theological explanations, polytheistic constructs in which a different god was deployed to explain each of a multitude of phenomena.
4
If you’d like to, say, get up, take a shower, get dressed, go to work, interact with family and friends, and get back to sleep without being frozen with introspection, reflection, and the types of philosophical analyses reserved for university apartments and ample supplies of pizza and beer.
5
According to this study, 2 - 34% of ancient humans endured blunt force trauma to the skull. The literature shows a range of outcomes, but the conclusion is generally that neanderthals and ancient humans took a rather unthinkable number of blows to the head, by modern standards.
6
The Ship of Theseus and other gedankens.