Depressed Metabolism

“The crisis of empiricism, expressed in David Hume’s scepticism, was the product of a misinterpretation of knowledge and vanishes for a correct interpretation – such is the outcome of a philosophy grown from the soil of modern science. The rationalist has not only presented the world with a series of untenable systems of speculative philosophy [...]

Mind uploading advocate Kenneth Hayworth has launched an interesting website devoted to the science of brain preservation. Of particular interest is his Proposal for a Brain Preservation Technology Prize (PDF). This document includes one of the most comprehensive discussions of chemopreservation as a strategy for personal survival. For example, one of the most common objections [...]

Cryonics Institute President Ben Best talks about cryonics and how cryonics is related to rejuvenation in this one-hour long interview on “It’s Rainmaking Time!”
Further Reading: Depressed Metabolism Interview with Ben Best

Peter Thiel, one of the few original minds in the life extension and accelerating-technological-change community, is featured in a short interview at Wired. Thiel seems to be aware of the limitations of extrapolation of trends:

We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets [...]

Scientific consensus seems a reasonable concept. If a great number of individual scientists arrive at a similar opinion this is generally a sufficient reason to have confidence in those views. Skeptics about scientific consensus often use examples of scientific views that started out as a minority view to become the majority view later. Although these [...]

The Detroit News features a story about cryonics that is a good illustration of the upward battle that cryonics faces in the media. First and foremost, this story reinforces the idea that cryonics concerns the practice of freezing dead people:
Preparation of the body is a five-day procedure. It begins with keeping the body as cool [...]

At EconLog economist Bryan Caplan has posted a number of blog entries that perfectly illustrate what happens when cryonics is not presented as a form of experimental long term critical care medicine but linked to other ideas such as transhumanism, mind uploading, and immortalism. One post is titled “What’s Really Wrong With Cryonics” but a [...]

Singularity skeptic Mark Plus drew my attention to the following blog post. The author writes that:

Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a [...]

David Stove’s book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies is a remarkable collection of essays. As a staunch positivist ,the author is not impressed with most of what constitutes “philosophy” (or the quality of our thinking in general). As Stove laments in the preface, “there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories.” But [...]

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with individuals in the life extension and cryonics movement. Rudi Hoffman is an Alcor and CI member and the most prominent seller of cryonics life insurance policies.  His website with information about how to fund cryonics can be found here.
Did you find out about cryonics before [...]

The biggest obstacle to the acceptance of cryonics is medical myopia; the idea that someone who has been pronounced dead by contemporary medical criteria will still be considered dead by future criteria. Advocates of human cryopreservation strongly argue against this. There are few things more discomforting than the idea that medical professionals of the future [...]

In sensationalized accounts of cryonics, explicit descriptions of cryonics procedures, and that of neuropreservation in particular, are used to invoke a negative response in the reader.  Some bioconservatives have argued that disgust experienced in response to certain ideas and practices is “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it” (Leon [...]

On the forum of the Immortality Institute there is an interesting exchange about the feasibility and time line for reversible cryopreservation. Cryobiologist Brian Wowk weighs in with some interesting observations:

I think in the next 20 years more small animal organs, and perhaps some human organs, may be reversibly cryopreserved. The best scenario for cryonics would [...]

Alcor’s recent news item about its 2009 Annual Board Meeting and Strategic Meeting contains a number of encouraging statements. On the front of institutional reform, however, there is not much news to report. The passage about the need to balance recruiting new Board members and preserving institutional memory reads as a rather uninspired defense of [...]

One question that is going to be of great interest is how aging baby boomers will confront aging and death. Where previous generations have found peace in religion and silent resignation, there are reasons to believe that this generation will not be so complacent. The baby boom generation, or at least those who have shaped [...]

There is a growing literature that discusses the technical aspects of revival of cryonics patients. The following list of the published literature was compiled by Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas and published as an appendix of their article on molecular nanotechnology in Cryonics Magazine 2008-4:
Robert C.W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, Doubleday, NY, 1964
Jerome B. [...]

Today is the second anniversary of Depressed Metabolism. As of writing, this website has close to 200 feed subscribers. On an average day the website has 150 unique visitors, which is an encouraging increase in traffic since our last update. This is even more remarkable in light of the fact that new blog entries with [...]

Danila Medvedev has translated Ben Best’s  article “Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice” into Russian. The translation is available on the KrioRus website. The original Engish article was published in Rejuvenation Research and is available as a PDF file at the Cryonics Institute website.
ABSTRACT
Very low temperatures create conditions that can preserve tissue for centuries, possibly [...]

In his classic book Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) Terence W. Hutchison  makes the case for economics as an empirical science.
An interesting aspect about this book is the ease with which Terence W. Hutchison uses logical empiricist authors like Moritz Schlick, Rudulf Carnap, and Otto Neurath but also the “critical rationalist” Karl [...]

There will be two cryonics meetings in Oregon this weekend.
Eugene area cryonics meet-up:
Saturday August 15th 5:00pm
Cozmic Pizza (coffee, salads, wine, beer and any kind of pizza you’d like from gluten free to regular or vegan)
199 W 8th Ave
Eugene, OR 97401
(541) 338-9333
Portland area cryonics meet-up:
Sunday August 16th 2:00pm
Deschutes Brewpub
210 NW 11th Avenue
Portland, OR 97209
More information on [...]

Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, and one of the few futurist thinkers with a solid understanding of the philosophy of science, outlines his current views on the global warming controversy after being identified as a “denier” and “anti-science” by  some of his (transhumanist) critics:

We skeptics (okay, “planetary traitors” if you prefer) actually hold [...]

Most contemporary philosophers and social scientists have little interest and understanding of logic or the physical sciences and  therefore have little to offer to those who want to understand the philosophical aspects of knowledge. The following five books have been written by thinkers who have a great respect for science and the importance of empirical [...]

The 2008-3 issue of Alcor’s Cryonics Magazine contains a number of articles about the pitfalls of (excessive) scientific optimism and its potential adverse effects on the organizational and practical aspects of cryonics. My own contribution contrasts cryonics as medical conservatism with the kind of scientific meliorism that is often associated with movements such as transhumanism [...]

My good friend Veronique Rinaldi has launched a blog called Lisbon Noir that features beautiful photography of various locations in Lisbon, Portugal. So far the blog has posted entries on abandoned industrial locations, water reservoirs, cemeteries, chocolate stores, and the minimalist art of Dan Flavin.

From the preface of Michael Munowitz’s Principles of Chemistry:

The wonder of the world is not its complexity, but its simplicity. Given enough color and canvas, anybody can make a mess; that, we do ourselves. More to admire is the artist who makes do with little, the artist whose art is to conceal an economy of [...]

The June 2009 issue of Rejuvenation Research features an article by Cryonics Insitute President Ben Best about the involvement of nuclear DNA damage in the aging process:

Abstract
This paper presents evidence that damage to nuclear DNA (nDNA) is a direct cause of aging in addition to the effects of nDNA damage on cancer, apoptosis, and cellular [...]

Real estate is all about location, location, location. Location matters in cryonics as well.
The objective of standby and stabilization in cryonics is to limit injury to the brain after pronouncement of legal death. Unfortunately, many cryonics patients have not been stabilized promptly after pronouncement of legal death because the cryonics organization did a poor job [...]

The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis)

According to this news item the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is taking legal action against the brother and sister of an Alcor member who “denied the foundation’s request for his body and didn’t notify them of their brother’s death until months after he was buried.” Although some may question the wisdom of pursuing this case [...]

Whenever there is a major economic event (a rapid decline of stock prices, a spike in the price of oil, high unemployment, etc.) the media can be counted on to feature a person who was predicting these events all along. This should not be surprising because there are so many professional economists and commentators who [...]

Hans Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy is among the most accessible and illuminating statements of logical empiricism. Although the book can be read as an introduction to philosophy, the central message of the work is that most of what constitutes philosophy is either (outdated) pre-scientific speculation or incoherent reasoning.
One of the most powerful chapters [...]