Why Cryonics & Life Extension make us rethink the meaning of Life and Time
The way that cultures have created myths and stories over centuries about the meaning of life and death foregrounds changing relationships to time and our use of it during our life, and the rituals undertaken when someone passes in order to ‘remember’ their time alive. With progression in medicine, relationships to the ‘end’ of life changed from myth to disease (Banjeree, 2017), and continue to change as new sciences promise extended or eternal life (O’Connell, 2017). This essay explores the industry of transhumanism, which aims to develop science and technology to overcome the limitations of the body, including the limitation on lifespan. In particular, it will explore cryonics which has an especially strong link to temporalities and time; cryonics is the freezing of people once they die in the hope that future science can revive them. This creates many dimensions deeply embedded in a speculative future, as well as a curious state of ‘frozen’ time.
Read a summarised version of this essay here.
There are many different ways to think about time and temporalities. The first section will address time briefly in the theory of physics, as well as the psychological aspect of time. It will also look at the relation of culture and time and how time becomes a commodity through capitalism as well as a state of thinking and being in the present and future. It will then bridge the theory of time to the industry of cryonics by looking at time in theory of life and death.
These theories of time will then be used to analyse the industry of cryonics and its own temporalities through three different perspectives: It’s relation to anticipating a certain future, time as a cryonics patient being in stasis, and how longevity sciences like cryonics reposition our temporality of life and mortality.
It will conclude that the mere prospect of having ‘more’ time radically shifts our attitudes towards the time of life and death and how we expect to spend our time.
Briefly Conceptualising Time
The Physics and Psychology of Time
Time is often associated with movement and change (Rovelli, 2017; Baraitser, 2017), and for physics time’s progression is entangled in entropy, the increase in disorder. This purely scientific explanation of thermo-dynamic time sees the universe travelling from a past of high order (low entropy) towards increasing disorder (high entropy) (Rovelli, 2017). Without change, argues Rovelli, we couldn’t perceive the flow of time and thus there would be no history. However, entropy does not ascertain that we see time in the right direction or even at the right speed. This said, it does imply a direction to time, a distinction from past to future. Time can be considered as three ‘arrows’ of time (Hawking, 2016); Thermodynamic time (entropy), psychological time (the way we perceive time passing) and cosmological time (the direction of time which the universe expands). Psychological time is most relevant to this essay since the way in which we perceive time to pass, and the value in that time, is important for considering our present and future as a transhuman society. In our many attempts to attach abstract values to quantify time (detailed below) time remains relative; the laws of physics such as gravity mean time moves slower on a mountain than the beach, and if only by a minor amount also impacts the speed of biological ageing (Rovelli, 2017). Aside from location, time is experienced at different speeds throughout life. Childhood years feel long, while adult years pass faster and faster (Leach, 1961). Leach argues this is evident in biology of life; children heal quicker, young plants grow faster, slowing with age. As with time in dreams, it moves much faster than waking life yet is perceived far slower. Perceptions of time can be warped by our context.
Before modern physics there were always multiple notions of time. Ancient Greek notions of time separate it into Chronos and Kairos; the former being an abstract attribution of numerical clock time, the latter a feeling of ‘opportune’ and ‘right’ time (Rämö, 1999). Time can further be split into cycles of nature and clock time, which further interlink with Chronos and Kairos. Natural cycles include day and night, planetary movements, reproductive cycles and phases of the moon. Clock and calendar time is an abstraction of days, months, schedules, events (Adam, 1995). Both are somewhat cyclical and repeating, as well as linear and irreversible. Leach (1961) argues that all time is either a repeating phenomenon or an irreversible change. Thought of as separate, they fall under the same name and possess the properties of each other; the hours on the clock are a repeating time, yet symbolise an irreversible movement forward, while ageing exemplifies irreversible time yet also takes part in the repeating cycle of birth and death.
Our time is marked with events, birthdays, marriage, New Year; we create intervals in time and thus create time by creating measurements passed and to come. Without such events, Leach (1961) argues there is no time to be measured.
Time is therefore typified by movements, measurements and change. However, the concept of ‘unbecoming time’ (Baraitser, 2017) contrasts this. Becoming is closely related to the constant movement and change of the theories of time above, it means evolving, from the past to the future. Baraitser argues that certain experiences of time put becoming in stasis. For those cryopreserved, this unbecoming time becomes very relevant later in the essay. While Baraitser does not try to deny that life continues to move forward in a state of becoming, from the embodied level time can be perceived to be in statis and non-becoming. For instance, in the sudden death of a loved one, time doesn’t just stop but feels ‘suspended’, this word exemplifies the psychological quality of this time state. Becoming requires transformation, yet in this time-state she argues becoming is set aside instead for maintenance of the existing.
Culture and Time
Since the Industrial Revolution, clock time found its place in factory and train schedules in the 24/7 churn of capitalism (Crary, 2014). Crary argues since then the Digital Revolution has sought to capture our time through the attention economy, competing for our eyeballs. Time becomes the most highly prized commodity.
Along that line, the preciousness of time means making the most of it, optimising it and being most prepared for the future. Adams et al. (2009) define our current time as one living not in the present but towards the future. Citizens must optimise themselves for a better future, be prepared for potential disasters (set on a background of possible nuclear or environmental catastrophe), and a reconfiguration of the ‘possible’ by anticipating previously impossible technologies. This is evident they argue in vaccination and examination for disease prevention (anticipating and optimising the future), the market for human organs and investment in drug trials (being prepared for future need).
Beck’s (1992) Risk Society takes the concept of irreversible time on a global scale, arguing that what were smaller scale disasters in the Industrial Revolution are now global existential threats to plants, animals and humans. Progress, in the risk society, is overshadowed by risk and links with Adams et al. (2009) argument that society today lives in preparation for disaster.
These concepts and positions towards time are mobilised through what Ahmed (2004) called Affective Economies. Affective language, as Ahmed declares in her example, can bind together nations under one cause such as anti-immigrant nationalism. Fear is often used to circulate ideas, and in cases of response to terrorism, determination in the face of fear. Affect therefore circulates societally, and in the case of optimising time and preparing for the future, fear and emergency are created on a societal level to mobilise the need to live the future in the present.
The fear of a catastrophic future and the need to prepare and optimise are nicely contrasted with the idea of utopia. Utopia is the idealisation of a better future (Levitas, 2000) but in the present, thinking of the utopia future means dealing with the risk and anticipatory society. In a question to students on the world they would like, explains Levitas, they focus on security rather than equality, which demonstrates the prevalence of risk society thinking. It is this anticipatory mode in which change towards a utopia must be achieved, it is a catalyst for change (Bloch, 1975; as cited in Levitas, 2000).
Life and Death
Thinking about life and death is often in relation to a finite ticking clock, counting down our time left. Banerjee (2007) unpacks the current age of the war against death to demonstrate death as no longer something that happens at the end of life, but is now increasingly dominant in our actions from the start and throughout life in the form of medicine. Death is framed as something that can be fixed by ‘doing’ something about it; A narrative of which the current economy, which relies of the pharmaceutical industry, must frame death as the enemy. As humans we believe ourselves ‘above’ death, controllers of nature. The need for healthy eating, cutting alcohol and cigarette consumption, tracking symptoms, all aim to minimise chances of dying while also profoundly engaging with the present, not the future. This can lead to a life lived in prognosis for some patients, living on the hope of 5% chance of living 5 more years, this sense of time permeates the present in anticipation of future life (Jain, 2007).
Bridging between life in prognosis and the anticipation of transhuman technologies is the political economy of hope (Novas, 2006). For those in particular need or want of treatments, science offers the hope that new advances will be made available in the near future, which leads to a life living in hope towards a possible future. As examined later, those opting for cryogenics are those such people.
Adam (1995) argues that while the health of life and death finds it time relating to nature and cycles, it is also entangled with clock time in the way we perceive lifetimes as finite, measurable and quantifiable. Diagnosis leads to the feeling that time is running out, that time as entropy highlights the physical deterioration and finitude of life and aging. In terminal cancer diagnosis, time both runs out and drags on in anticipation.
In addition to this, in conceptualising time as infinite in both the past and the future Rappleye & Komatsu (2016) argue any length of human lifespan seems meaningless from the position of the self, a life not even a second in the history of the universe. Lifespan, then, becomes an important measurement for psychological time and our perception of our time in life and death.
Time Orientations in the Cryonics Industry
Transhumanism & Cryonics
Transhumanism is an industry of technology, academic thought and in some regards cult-like extremism with the belief, and desire, to indefinitely extend human life as well as transcend the biological limits of the body through upgrading piece by piece to a machine (O’Connell, 2017). Becoming ‘post-human’ would mean we “no longer suffer from disease, ageing and inevitable death (O’Connell, 2017, p.34). Sometimes diverting into the territory of ‘cyborg’, technologies from transhuman industries are already prevalent, O’Connell gives the common examples of glasses, bionic limbs, pacemakers and mobile phones which extend the physical body and its limitations. New medical industries emerge in ‘longevity sciences’ with the aim to eventually find a cure for ageing and the diseases that come with it, like Alzheimer’s and cancer. SENS Research Foundation’s founder De Grey says 120 years is an achievable lifetime for those today with the predicted breakthroughs, but as new medicines emerge in those extended years, life can be extended indefinitely, even to 1,000 years (Callahan & Gaylin, 2017).
For those who cannot wait the 30 or more years for the initial technologies to become available, the cryonics industry offers the chance to transcend time in the hope transhuman science and technology advances in the future. Pitched at atheists who do not believe in a life after death, cryonicists are on hand during predicted deaths (like terminal cancer, not a car crash) to offer vitrification of their body (or head) in liquid nitrogen within the 6 minutes before the body’s cells become damaged beyond repair in total brain death (Farman, 2018). Freezing before this time pauses the decay process, suspending the patient (as they call them) in ‘deanimation’, in the hope that future technology allows for ‘reanimation’ and a cure for whatever ailment killed them. The 6 minutes the brain typically reaches brain death is slowed down to 100 sextillion years, longer than expected lifespan of the universe (ibid).
The following sections will look at the anticipatory temporality of choosing to become cryonically suspended, as well as its temporality as a person in indefinite statis and (literally) ‘frozen’ time. This will be further analysed to look at how these allow us to reflect on our time in the world, the time scales we have seen and foresee to happen, and the time-orientation of the present.
Cryonics anticipates the future
The very premise behind cryonics is anticipatory in nature. It is not a form of burial, a new way to care for the body in afterlife, but of preservation for a possible future, no matter how slim that possibility may be. Without anticipation of the future being a certain way (a utopian vision that we will eventually develop the science to ‘reanimate’ these patients and cure them of their cause of death), cryonicists would not go to the expense of it all. It is that glimmer of hope, the economy of hope as Novas (2006) calls it, that science will one day catch up. Cryonics is an industry that lives entirely in a vision of the future.
Adams et al (2009) theorised the aspects of an anticipatory future being divided into that of optimisations, preparation, anticipatory regimes and a mindset that affects the present.
Firstly, cryonics aims to optimise life in the future in the hope that while the patient may die today of something incurable, they will be reanimated in a future that has a cure, not only from death but their disease, and even the possibility to sustain their life indefinitely (Farman, 2018).
One concern is that on reanimation the patient will be in a world beyond the time of their friends and family’s lives (if they didn’t also opt for cryopreservation), therefore their life may be significantly less enjoyable (Shaw, 2009). However, since cryopreservation happens after legal death, they would no longer be alive with their friends anyway. For some, the chance at any life is better than no life.
Secondly, cryopreservation is anticipatory in its sense of preparation. For an ill patient in prognosis of near death, doctors are on hand to quickly start cryopreservation when the time comes. The patient takes measures to prepare for their death, they are expectant of a future trauma as Adams et al. (2009) put it, and therefore live their present in anticipation of such future. Cryopreservation is apparently expert at preparation, yet has been criticised for its lack of foresight of other traumas (Shaw, 2009). For instance, socio-political barriers like the Government of the time deciding against the reanimation or hosting refugees of time, of ecological disasters causing system failure and the defrost and death of patients (ibid). Patients are aware of potential risks, yet some still choose the small hope it might work over the many possible barriers. Alike to the life in prognosis (Jain, 2007) a small chance of life gives hope for their future. The relation to the future is quantifiable with chances and risks, and relates with clock time with the estimated speed of innovation predicting when they will be reanimated.
Thirdly, alike to the medical anticipatory regimes of vaccinations and pre-diagnostic check-ups, cryonics is an anticipatory regime that permeates the life in the present. While vaccines are a regime to prevent illness, cryonics is a regime to prevent death, since science declares it not an inevitable condition (Farman, 2018). Life extension becomes a regime already being fulfilled, with three years added to lifespan every decade (Callahan & Gaylin, 2017), therefore the cryonics regime becomes an extension of this, helping those expecting death in the near future wait until lifespan continues to rise. However, this is a regime seen as unethical upon those it ‘steals’ resources from (Stodolsky, 2016; Shaw, 2009). Cryonics can cost anywhere from $8,000 to $200,000, money which some argue is taken from the inheritance of those alive and able to benefit from it (Shaw, 2009). If reanimation didn’t work, the money would be ‘wasted’ and lost, thus the sense of injustice for those alive in present because of the patient’s vision of their possible future. ‘If’ it did work, however, cryonic suspension is just an interruption to their life, like a coma, thus no-one would justify a claim on inheritance while someone is alive (ibid). This ‘interruption’ to life is the topic of the next analysis of temporalities in the cryonics industry, life in stasis.
Life in Indefinite Stasis
Living in a temporality of the future, anticipating what it may become and implementing preparations based on time in prognosis, is evident for those opting for cryonic suspension. However, in the suspension of cryonics itself, time takes on a different shape; frozen but also moving on.
Frozen, waiting, suspended, time-travelling, missing lifetimes; these are all associated with the state in which a patient is in while under cryonic suspension.
According to many accounts of time, a person under suspension experiences complete lack of time. Thermo-dynamic time requires a change in entropy (Hawking, 2016) but under vitrification cell change is so miniscule it cannot be said to change (Farman, 2018). If entropy is associated with the time in the universe, then the 6-minute decay process that is slowed to a span extending beyond the time of the universe can hardly be called time at all. If change is key to time, then the patient does not experience time.
Psychological time is more complex. At present, cryonically preserved patients remain under suspension, meaning there is no brain activity. Without brain activity, the patient cannot perceive time. If the patient were reanimated, they would experience a ‘time gap’ (Farman, 2018), a period of time where not only do they have no awareness of, but also awaken possibly with no existing bank accounts, contracts, home, family, no awareness of present-day customs and culture. It will be as if they were born again. Time that existed while they were suspended will be treated as history before our birth is treated, aware of it and continuing our life unaware of its affects. Their psychological time may be disrupted in a disorienting way that is not the same as our current relation to time periods we did not live through, since our birth today is the beginning, while a reanimated patient’s ‘birth’ is a return after a gap in psychological time. We cannot know the consequences or the trauma of such an experience, hence the discussion of ethics relating to reanimation (Shaw, 2007). As our only experience of time is linear and undisrupted, it is all we know, therefore reawakening from suspension would begin a new relation and understanding of time and our experience of it.
Baraitser (2017) writes of ‘unbecoming’ time as the experience of a temporality of time not moving, of perhaps knowing it’s moving on around you but feeling in a period of suspension. This in some ways links to the cryopreserved patient, but is an experience that is felt and embodied that requires psychological time, yet they are not conscious to experience it in this way. However, in regard to becoming, of time in motion, in contrast to suspension and stasis, some resemblance can be discussed. From her perspective, becoming and motion signify time and life passing, while an experience of stasis is the opposite of becoming, and therefore the opposite of time and life itself. If ‘life’ is to be that of movement and constant becoming, then the ‘radical suspension’ she describes is exactly that of the cryopreserved patients; they cannot be said to be in life as their radically suspended cellular processes prevent movement and becoming, therefore also preventing time passing under this notion.
In addition to this, Baraitser’s notion that an unbecoming experience of time is that where the static being is suspended while being aware the world continues to move without them. While the patient under this condition cannot experience this, prior to being vitrified on signing-up for this process they may be aware that their time will pause while that of those in their life will continue forward. Time therefore is relative (Leach, 1961; Rovelli, 2017). Time for the patient stops on deanimation, and begins again once they’re reanimated, their psychological time to them may feel linear (even if aware of a time gap). For those around them, years continue to go by. The speed of these lives in comparison may be like comparing the time of someone who takes a sleep and someone who stays awake, does it go faster or slower for the one asleep?
The only way to consider this perception of time is to look at accounts of people who died and came back to life, since they did not exceed to 6-minute time it takes for total death and neither do cryopreserved patients. Those describing their experience of time in these final minutes describe “nothing” and “no sense of time” as well as having no memories (Hinde, 2020). Like that of unbecoming time, perhaps the patient’s lack of time experience is incomparable to simply slowing, stopping, but in this state time doesn’t exist. With such an experience of non-existent time, any ‘gap’ in time is a culture or materialistic relation to the world rather than a psychological gap, since passing of time is not experienced in such state.
While cryonics shifts our idea of linear passing of time before and after re-animation, it also shifts the concept of time passing and lifespans for those in the present. This will be explored in the following section.
Cryonics Patients and Their Relation to Life, Time and The Moving World
Linking back to the premise of this essay is the way cultural processes encapsulate and foreground particular relations and attitudes to time, in particular the way we think about our lifetime in relation to new life extending sciences.
In what is often considered a way of coping with the anxiety of what happens after death (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2016), religious thought has imagined heavens and hells and reincarnations that depict consciousness transcending the body after death and enjoying immortality. Cryonics is marketed at a secular group of society who believe death to be a finite end to consciousness, cryonics then is a science-based chance at an afterlife (Farman, 2018). The body is seen to “ticking with the sound of its own end” (Farman, 2018, p.316) where life and consciousness end with the death of the body. Cryonics offers a relation to infinite rather than finite time.
This creates a tension between accepting the finite time of (secular) death or starving it off with new potential sciences (Farman, 2018). To deny such innovation, in the belief that it may actually work, would be a stance towards accepting a finite lifespan, while every choice to opt for cryonics is one battling with death and attempting to push it back. The political economy of hope sells the prospects of cryonics working as well as the inevitability that miracle treatments will emerge at some point in the future (Novas, 2006). Those accepting death may choose to do so because they believe in a finite lifespan, but may also not buy into the economy of hope and see no alternative to a finite life.
Time is relative, different periods of life feel faster or slower, and time too is felt differently for those whose life is ‘cut short’. This suggests that there is culturally held some “right” lifespan, and Jain (2007) argues that if we knew our lifespan would this change if and when we do things in life? Would we qualify for senior citizenship at an earlier age, or a later age? Life ‘time’ is something quantifiable and helps us make sense of events in life, the passing of time and “inevitable” decline of ageing. Lifetime is chronic but also merges with Kairos time in that there may be a “right” length; there are many things to be achieved in life and 70 or 80 years isn’t “enough” time to achieve it, leading to a life chronically incomplete (Farman, 2018). This explains the yearning for cryonics, a second chance to complete the things left undone. Life extension, explains Farman, is about time extension. A human life is barely a blink in the history of the universe causing it to lose meaning and a sense of purpose (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2016), but life and time extension increases meaning through extended time in history.
Medicine and science have shaped human relation to mortality; death once bestowed by a dark cloaked figure is now known to be caused by disease (Banerjee, 2017). Medicine, and cryonics, become the mediator between life and death, and thus affect our relation to mortality and finite time. Both medicine and cryonics offer more time, even if it is not infinite time. “Being frozen is the second worst thing that can happen to you” says Cryonic’s Institute’s founder (Nuwer, 2016), it is so because death in secular society is finite and irreversible, while cryonics is unknown but offers more hope than finality. Fighting death becomes the meaning of life, and thus the meaning of time alive (Banerjee, 2017).
If medical advances for longer lives and reanimation from cryonics indeed succeed, society will be faced with a new relation to time. Callahan and Gaylin (2017) explain our expectations of reasonable timeframes for events, like marriage and children, would be significantly changed. The age of marriage and having children has shifted over the years as lives have got longer due to medicine and societal changes, so would continue to move onwards in life if medicine allowed women to have children later in their chronological life. The prospect of hundreds of years of marriage, many different careers and more economic mobility would have to be considered (ibid). Our relation to the events that symbolise stages of our time of life would radically change (Leach, 1961). To further understand this new relation to time, Helm et al (2021) convinced their participants of the likelihood of life extension and this led to them judging social transgressors more harshly. A longer lifespan therefore was found to create an increased need for safety and law enforcement, since biological reasons for dying would be eliminated and social causes of death would remain. The harshness in how they expected transgressors to be treated was higher for those thinking longer life was plausible. Our expected time alive therefore affects attitudes towards the conduct of society.
Another way that the relation to the time of life, time itself and the movement of life is affected by cryonics is the prospect of the returned. They would be “Like alien creatures” in a possibly alien world, depending on how far in the future they are reanimated (Nuwer, 2016). The time gap discussed in the previous section also relates to the contrast between those having skipped time and those who lived it, and the juxtaposition between two temporalities of life. Having essentially time travelled, they may not possess the modern-day skills to work, be in shock by new changes in society (if to be really speculative, they may not even awaken on Earth), and therefore possess a totally different temporality and knowledge of “the times” than those who lived in the recent years. Skills or education gained in X time period would become new social credit, thus time itself and the time lived becomes commodified once more, as does our ‘time spent’ online today. Those born 120 years ago, or those 250 after cryonic suspension, would have different values as their chronic time is quantified and valued in a new society with a broader range of ages and time-periods.
Summary
The entire premise of life-extension and the hope that cryonics will work is of a utopian ideal world where all desired medical innovations are achieved, and the world of the time is one worth living in. Cryonics requires a great deal of preparation, desire for optimisation based on this utopian world, and anticipation that such a future will exist. It’s ‘selling point’ is a temporality set towards a future, yet its experience is far from it. Without awakening a cryopreserved person it is unknown the exact experience, and whether that experience be coma-like or utterly non-existent, either way the experience of cryonics is not of future time but of no time, of ‘radical suspension’ of time (Farman, 2018). We conceptualise this time as frozen since ideas of time are so entangled with motion and change, while cryonics patients pay thousands to ensure they do not experience change.
Cryonics and sciences of life-extension further shift how much time we expect to have, if and when certain life events should occur under new rules of lifespan, and affect our societal values on how we hope the world we live to be, if we are to be there much longer. A new world of people living alongside each other from a broader range of decades would shift our relation to the value of experience as well as engagement with history.
While the world after the possible reanimation of cryonics patients would radically shift our understanding of lifetime and temporalities, it is speculative and unknown. However, what is known is that the mere prospect of such sciences alters our way of thinking about our time and how we use it.
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