It's fascinating, and personally a bit disturbing, to read about his death as an announcement of cryopreservation ("being cryopreserved now") instead of the sad news it is anyway ("died today"). Also the discussion here revolves around he coming back, not he leaving.
Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/
I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Anyway, I'd like to write down a regular epitaph:
Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014), second PGP developer after Zimmerman, first Bitcoin recipient, cypherpunk who wrote code.
It sounds from the language used ("he did not want his vital functions supported any further but should be allowed to cease functioning and promptly be cryopreserved") that he didn't regard this moment as death at all - merely pausing his life until a) ALS is curable and b) we have the technology to reawaken cryopreserved people.
To him, all that was worth announcing here is the cryopreservation.
Personally, I think cryonics is a pipe dream right now. But I completely respect and empathize with the wishes of Hal Finney to put hope into a future life, possibly without the burden of ALS that he was forced to deal with for a significant portion of his life.
If he had the means to do it, and it gave him something while he was still alive, than I would say it was worth it to him.
You're probably right, but I just thought about it from the point of view of someone dying from a (currently) incurable illness.
On one hand, you can die, and that will probably be it for you.
On the other hand, you can become cryogenically preserved. In that case, there are two outcomes I can see. One, you're never revived (which is functionally equivalent to death). The other, you awake (in what feels like an instant) in a world where you can continue living. That certainly makes it seem tempting for me.
It seems strange to me to place him into "cold storage" after he was completely ravaged by ALS and had died. Wouldn't there be more hope for a recovery if he had been placed into a frozen state before his physical form had died? No doubt a dicey area of law but surely a treatment for ALS will be reached for those still living before we discover a treatment of ALS for those who are already terminal.
Cryonics is the opposite of religious faith in an afterlife, actually. It only makes sense with strict physicalism. If your self is neural state (structural and chemical but not electrical), and the state is preserved, then your life is on pause. That's almost a truism.
Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases without any of the modern implants and conveniences and no money or credit to get them they were unemployable. Then there is Woody Allen's "Sleeper" :-)
Not that exact source but the same theme. Kind of sobering. A friend of mine is an Alcor member and totally ready to be frozen if he can't upload his mind into the Internet first.
I find it really annoying when people compare cryopreservation to religious belief in an afterlife.
It's sort of like saying "Dieting is an eating disorder"- Yes, they share some superficial similarities (and some people may have both) but in any substantive way they are totally different things.
I think they're superficially different, and continuing the eating disorder analogy, consider this anecdote. in the middle ages, monks and nuns used to torment themselves in many ways. While men used various inventive self-corporal-punishment techniques, women mostly employed one: starvation. It was their fight against their earthly body, which they tried to minimize as possible. So was that an eating disorder? Absolutely! It's just that today, instead of reducing your earthly body to become more spiritual, women (mostly) have other excuses for the same practice, namely modern standards of beauty. When a sociologist or anthropologist encounters something like that, the assumption is that a deep underlying human psychological need uses contemporary ideas and beliefs to find justification. When it was "known" that superhuman deities rule the world, the afterlife was their domain; now, when science rules, ideas from science fiction explain those (currently?) superhuman abilities and the after-life they bring. So the same deep cause is expressed using contemporary ideas.
If you don't like the word religion, we can call it "a belief in the afterlife", although the same trend applies to other behaviors that have commonly been considered religious, so the correlation is far stronger than just a belief in the afterlife (there are also notions about "purity" that are now explained by pseudo/shoddy science).
I find it interesting that cryonics and the singularity are both 'modern' religions with that are vary similar in tone to many past religions. They both seems reasonable on the surface, but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Much like all that new age QM BS uses a few of the right words without much substance.
I think it's exactly the other way around. Cryonics/singularity is only similar to religion on the surface, but if you dig down into the details, you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress.
I'd say that quite a lot of opposition to those ideas is religion-based. I.e. if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle, then you must either disagree with modern infomation theory or believe in vitalism.
We already use cryopreservation for sperm and revive them so on the surface it seems reasonable. The issue is it's not black magic we know freezing does not prevent decay it just greatly slows it down. Which presents a fundamental flaw as the dificulty in reviving someone keeps increasing over time.
So, if the goal was maximizing the chance of revival you would study decay rates do some cost benifit analysis and keep trying to improve your approach. But, that's not what's happening. It's preform ritual X and wait for magic to happen.
As to the singularity, the basic assumption is super intelegence allows for super technology. However, the basic laws of physics still apply. I don't care how smart your computer is it's not going to accuratly predict the weather 6 months from now. If the universe says no them traveling faster than light stays impossible etc.
> you realize that there's no element of faith, only reasonable extrapolation of technological trends and a hedge against progress.
Religions are based on similar premises (given what humans knew about life at the time of their founding), and your argument is, in fact, known as Pascal's Wager[1].
Those arguing against faith will claim that the money spent is very certain and a very unreasonable bet. Others, like me, see some immediate, earthly benefits in religion, be it cryonics, singularity or another religion, and consider the money well spent.
> if you can't believe that a cryopreserved person can be revived in principle...
Thing is, you can't deny god's existence in principle, nor even disprove Christianity, and since Christianity seems to be in opposition to cryonics (hmm, actually, it might not be) then you're in serious trouble whether you agree with modern information theory or not (physics, and maybe even mathematics, might not hold in christian hell).
Personally, I think human beings, as a product of our evolution, are so ill adapted even to our semi-primitive civilization and its own repressive discontents, that I cannot possibly see us living our immortal coils.
BTW, are cryonics and singularity part of the same mythology? I mean, is there perhaps a book painting a clear (or, better yet - vague) picture of how this all would work out?
> BTW, are cryonics and singularity part of the same mythology?
As far as I can tell, those are two completely separated, though not unrelated concepts. Cryopreservation is about a hope that we'll get advanced enough technology, whether or not singularity occurs before or after. Singularity is about progress of technology accelerating to the point we absolutely, positively can't keep up with it, so we can't predict how anything will look after singularity.
> but don't really work if you dig down into the details.
Don't really work? There is no evidence that you can be brought back from cryopreservation, but assuming that it might one day be possible doesn't require throwing out all the known physical laws of the universe so it's hardly a religion.
Cryopreservation is not based on faith, it's based on a little bit of optimism. It's not a religion.
Edit: qualified on the amount of optimism required
There's a false dichotomy here. It is possible for religions to be true, and for an afterlife to exist at the same time that the possibility of revival after cryopreservation exists.
The cryopreserved person simply wasn't truly dead yet in such a scenario. An afterlife can still commence after whatever cosmic rules that indicate true death are satisfied.
Certainly everyone will die, no matter what. There is no materialist vision of immortality that can work in a universe with a finite life span.
Cryopreservation works for sperm which have been revived after 21 years, which IMO is positive evidence.
The issue is not the possibility of some sort of revival if everything works perfectly so much as the approach and mindset of people involved. After all mummification may in some cases have sufficiently preserved flesh to allow for cloning, but that's not a meaningful resurrection for the person or animal who died. Similarly, unless the tissues are sufficiently preserved so memory's can be recovered it's a pointless exercise and even at the temperatures involved decay still occurs.
Which IMO is what crosses into religion territory. The actual estimates of the probability of success and the lack of basic research into the actual degradation that occurs over time.
PS: At no point did I suggest religion was a bad thing or any of this was impossible etc. It's the mindset where the parallels are clear.
There's a difference between a "belief in an unknowable deity" and extrapolating current scientifical problems and believing in technologies that are known to work. Molecular nanotech, which seems to be the holy grail for restoring cryopreserved patients, is something that is known to work (it's called "life"), and the only missing link is that we don't have much control over it yet. Unless you assume life is magic and information theory doesn't work with brains, there's a solid case for cryopreservation.
Your logic is unsound. There is a huge difference between seeing that something is possible in principle and "a solid case", one that merits spending vast sums of money on. That difference is known in religious studies as "a leap of faith".
If you need that leap of faith spelled out, then these are the steps that must be true in order for cryonic preservation to be real and desirable (i.e. "worth it"): the scientific feat you describe needs to be really possible and not just in principle; humans are able to achieve this technology; the preservation process used today must be correct; technology must progress long enough for humans to achieve this technology; future society must be motivated to resurrect our dead; the kind of life offered in the future is one the preserved would desire; the resurrected would be able to adapt to future society; the resurrected would have the means to live a meaningful life in future society.
Sure, those are all valid concerns, but all of them are within the realm of possibility. We don't know if we'll achieve the technology, but we know we can in principle. We don't know if future people will care about reviving us, or that we'd even want to live in that future, but it is possible.
Note that there's no religion here anywhere, everything is casual and derived through logic from the current state of reality.
Cryopreservation is taking a fully <del>scientific</del><ins>materialistic</ins>, supernatural-free bet that gives you 0.1% (or 0.01%, or whatever) chance of not dying, when your only other choice is to die with 100% certainity. So unless you believe that you'll piss off God if you dump his promise and freeze yourself, you're better off cryopreserving than not. There is no leap of faith here, it's a result of plain utility calculations, if you agree that being being alive has nonzero utility while being dead has zero.
Those descriptors are not synonyms. There are many, many ways to be unscientific without any pretension of the supernatural. I think the word you wanted was to say "fully materialistic, supernatural-free bet".
The definition of science given by Francis Bacon and carried through to the modern era is that that a hypothesis is not accepted as valid until it has been tested experimentally, and a hypothesis must be tested after it has been formed (to avoid the sharpshooter fallacy). Modern versions allow you to use math, but that's as far as it goes. In this case, cryonics is obviously not scientific, because its effectiveness has not been demonstrated with the scientific method -- and that is what science is!
> ... chance of not dying, when your only other choice is to die with 100% certainty
You see, those aren't the only choices. I won't debate the chances of success, but assuming they are as high as you believe, there's a chance you're trading your certain death for an eternal life in a jar in some future hellish lab.
> Note that there's no religion here anywhere
There's religion here everywhere. I see people spending money for a chance at an afterlife they have absolutely no proof of. I see vast exaggeration of some anecdotal observations (miracles?) as "knowledge" of life. I see people finding comfort in an unknown future predicated on the powers of some super-human entity (at least super-human compared to the present) and on the optimistic belief in the benevolence of that entity. In short I see religious texts and religious arguments, hence: religion.
> I see people spending money for a chance at an afterlife they have absolutely no proof of.
There is a casual, down-to-Earth, no-supernatural-powers-required, fully constrained to known laws of physics and mechanisms of biology chain of reasoning that this could work. There's a huge qualitative difference between this and believing in God.
Sure, we can argue whether or not it's worth spending money on right now; if you start including things like "burden on your relatives" or "probability of undesirable future" or "probability that current preservation techniques destroy too much information" in your calculations you might end up deciding it's not worth the cost yet, but it doesn't change that the idea is sound in principle.
> I see vast exaggeration of some anecdotal observations (miracles?) as "knowledge" of life.
Are you calling modern molecular biology, chemistry and information theory a bunch of "anecdotal observations"? Sure, whatever. But even if, it's still the best thing we have to reason from.
> I see people finding comfort in an unknown future predicated on the powers of some super-human entity (at least super-human compared to the present) and on the optimistic belief in the benevolence of that entity.
You're bundling two different concepts together (which might be excusable, because people who believe in cryonics also often believe in superhuman AIs). Still, cryonics does not depend on any super-human entity or its values, it only depends on whether or not we crack nanotech (or some other technology we don't know yet).
> In short I see religious texts and religious arguments, hence: religion.
Where you see religion, I see reasonable assumptions based on current scientific knowledge, extrapolated by applying cold, hard rationality.
> There's a huge qualitative difference between this and believing in God.
Don't confuse God with religion. A lack of deities does not make this not a religion (see nontheistic religions[1]). Also, why are you discounting what you call "supernatural" beliefs? Even physics is based on some assumptions (laws of symmetry) and ends at the big bang. If you look at the past 50 years of medicine and biology -- especially human biology -- you'll find many wrong conclusions (see Ioannidis's "why most published medical research is false"). You're exaggerating our scientific capabilities while discounting the limits to our understanding. In fact, you're turning science and technology into your religion. Don't overestimate human capacity and don't underestimate our stupidity (but don't do the opposite either).
BTW, I'm not even sure cryonics falls under the category of nontheistic religions, as "humans" with the power to resurrect the dead (and by extension eliminate natural death) are no different from a deity. Your religion is justified by what we know, as were others. The only qualitative mistake here, I think, is yours: as people who know (some) and love science, we know that it has limits. We have limits to observation, and, most pertinently, we have limits of tractability and understanding of complex systems. I don't think scientists assume we'll one day know something, and they certainly don't assume we'll have a specific far-fetched technology.
> Still, cryonics does not depend on any super-human entity or its values
I wasn't talking about AI, I was talking about future "humans" (is that what they would be in a world without death?) with technology we do not possess, hence super-compared-to-us-humans.
It's not a lot of money actually, it's just life insurance, a portion of which is allocated to Alcor in case cyropreservation is possible after death. Maybe $20 a month or something depending on your age when you got the policy, plus an annual fee that is mostly deductible as a charitable donation. I consider this fee donating to science, since Alcor actually does good science and publishes research papers. So $20 and a dream and maybe you get to try again.
It's not a risk free investment by any means, but it doesn't require heaps of denial involving topics of science like evolution, intolerance of others, or any dogma. If you want to think cryopreservation is like a religion by all means do, but you're not convincing me.
I don't think cryopreservation is like a religion; I've proven that's the case (albeit a religion without a personal deity, but there are others like that, I think). You're simply claiming that cryonics is a true religion, which might well be the case. In any event, I don't see spending money on alleviating the fear of death as wasteful by any means. That's how we spend most of our money anyway.
I accept that there is evidence that cryonics may become viable for human subjects in the future.
My point is merely that freezing one's own body despite a lack of any evidence that present methods would allow revival of a human in the future requires optimism that is not incomparable with religion.
It's a bet against future technology. How it differs from religion is that a/ we know that required technology is possible, b/ we are pretty confident that current cryopreservation methods are good enough for the required technology to be able to reverse the process, and c/ we make a bet that humanity will reach the point a/. Note that we are sure it can be done, we only don't know if it will be.
Although this is not part of the interesting religio-philosophical discussion we're all having here (which, BTW, finally fulfills my own dream of visiting 17th century Europe), that is simply not true. We are not sure it can be done, and we are even less sure it can be done with current preservation technology. There are few things in biology we are sure of, so many things that we only partly understand, and human neurobiology is very high on the list of things we understand least of. Also, your usage of the word "sure" sounds to me like saying, "well, we're sure God exists, we just don't know if He's Christian, Muslim or Jewish". After all, even if that were true, our actions must depend heavily on that second part of the sentence.
Finally, even if the god of cryonics is real, and even if he's Alcory, the preserved don't know if they're buying a ticket to heaven or to hell (see Cold Lazarus[1]).
Why are you so adamant to dismiss cryogenics and call it a religion? Should we just throw in the towel and stop researching it? Do you claim that everyone betting on new technologies are religious?
> Why are you so adamant to dismiss cryogenics and call it a religion?
Cryonics as practiced by people requesting to be frozen is a religion, but I'm not dismissing it, because I don't dismiss religion. Unlike Richard Dawkins, I don't see humanity thriving without religion, and I think the debate is theoretical, because I don't think humans can exist without creating religion.
> Should we just throw in the towel and stop researching it?
Of course not! We didn't stop studying the stars, and we ended up learning a lot from doing so -- but that doesn't make astrology not a religion. There's science and there's religion. Studying cryogenics is science; freezing yourself in the hope of being resurrected is religion. BTW, while we learned a lot from studying the stars while abandoning the religion surrounding them, we're still not much closer to reaching them than we were 200 years ago.
> Do you claim that everyone betting on new technologies are religious?
No. I might buy stocks in a company making a more efficient microwave oven (shit, I'm betting on my own actual startup). But when the matter at hand is our existential dread, and people change their behavior based on what is currently classified as bona-fide science fiction, become emotionally involved, and preach the great rewards to be bestowed on the faithful -- imagining, all the while a bright future while completely disregarding other possibilities -- then, yeah, you're looking at a religion.
>No. I might buy stocks in a company making a more efficient microwave oven (shit, I'm betting on my own actual startup).
This is what people are doing by having their bodies frozen after death; they are buying stake in some technology in hopes they will receive a return someday.
It's not incomparable in a mathematical sense, but the probability of any known religion being correct is not remotely on the same scale of reviving a suspended human mind.
That's not what's being debated. We're debating reviving with a yet unknown technique a human mind frozen with a particular one.
> the probability of any known religion being correct is not remotely on the same scale...
I'm an atheist, but that's totally unknown and presently unknowable. And don't provide as an example a very particular religion that rejects evolution (I don't know about muslims and other religions less known in the west, but most religious Jews and many Catholics don't reject evolution).
> That's not what's being debated. We're debating reviving with a yet unknown technique a human mind frozen with a particular one.
I know I'm repeating myself in every comment I make in this thread, but to reiterate. We know one possible technique that will work. We know that it exists, it is possible and that it can do the job in principle. We just don't know how to use it, because we didn't build that particular piece of technology.
There may be other ways we don't know about yet, but if there are none, then there's always the nanotech.
Please show us how we "know" (given that we know with certainty so few things in biology).
> then there's always the nanotech.
... and God's angels. You're forgetting them. The "nanotech" you're referring to is, at this point, no more (in fact, it is precisely) science-fiction. Even as recently as 40 years ago, people were certain we'd all have flying cars by now. We can conjecture but not know that we'll be able to achieve some future technologies, even if we see some prototype of them. The fact life exists does not mean we'll be able to engineer it, and certainly not "control" it. There are some things that are simply intractable. We can't even forecast the weather for more than several days, so from the fact life exists you deduce that we'll be able to replicate it with "nanotech"? Maybe we will, and maybe we won't. It might be cool if we do -- and it might be horrifying and lead to our destruction -- but you're constantly confusing science with science fiction. And remember: all science fiction -- as well as most religions in the time they're founded -- are premised on what we currently know.
> so from the fact life exists you deduce that we'll be able to replicate it with "nanotech"?
No. I asssert that life is nanotech. We've seen those things down to atomic level and we know from observation that every living thing is entirely made from machines pushing around molecules. The required technology is there, we don't even have to develop our own, we just need to get better at controlling the 'natural' one. There's some good progress in reprogramming bacteria and viruses to do our bidding, and there are no clear obstacles why we shouldn't be able to develop this further.
Can you please try to control the weather first? Because we know from observation that that's just molecules pushing each other around, and it's a lot less complicated then life, so it should be easier to control, right? (only -- intractability)
No, it's actually more complicated. Biological machinery doesn't push molecules at random. Sure it's a lot to work out, but we've been doing it for the last 100 years with a lot of success. Google up some things we can make bacteria do nowdays.
By the way, the primary obstacle to controlling the weather is not the molecular-level interactions, it's the power requirements. Given enough energy generation, we could control weather using today's technology, just as we can do indoors with air conditioning and various experiments like "hey, let's make a cloud indoors and make it rain". Hell, your friendly neighbourhood nuclear power plant produces clouds and rain as a part of its daily operations. We just don't have enough raw power to do it on planetary scale (and we'd probably screw ourselves over big time if we had), as this article [0] kindly explains.
There's no intractability here, with enough power you could just push the air around any way you like. Weather is transforming energy in a very, very complex set of feedback loops, but you could override it completely with even more energy. You can throw paper balls at a cat to try and get it to move somewhere, or you can just grab it and put it where you want it to be (and then catch it again, because it will most definitely try to escape).
> with enough power you could just push the air around any way you like
Maybe a real god could, but we can't. Unless you have tractor beams, anti-gravity force fields and other sci-fi tech, either you'd have to have these "weather machines" placed in a fairly tight grid, or intractability would rule (outside a small area of influence). The problem isn't just energy, but directing it.
Also, the inefficiency of ex: wind turbines would add a lot of energy which would be counter productive. You might be able to control the weather by blocking out the sun and then selectively lighting some areas over others. But that's not really controlling weather so much as setting the temperature on an AC.
So people were off by a few decades on timescales and on social/political uptake. Big deal.
Life exists, it's physical. Our control of physical processes has consistently improved. There isn't any issue in revival that has shown to be totally intractable, in a way that violates any key physical assumptions we have.
Let me make myself clear: I am not debating the possibility that revival could one day turn from the science-fiction it is now into a real technology. I am pointing out the leaps of faith people take to translate that reasonable scientific conjecture into actual life (or death) choices. Thinking about whether there is a god or isn't -- and trying to learn the truth -- makes you a philosopher; it is changing your behavior based on the assumption god exists and other presumptions about Her that makes you religious.
And freezing yourself, as I've mentioned in numerous other comments on this thread, is a choice based on assumptions other than technological -- for example that the future would be hospitable to people born and raised in our lifetime. I'm just thinking of how miserable Mark Twain would be in this age of Facebook, and how much misery Hemingway would experience in our era of reality television.
Do you agree then that all those non-technological assumptions can be included in one's utility calculations and that people can give different estimates to how friendly the future would look like? Or do you believe the probability of a bad future is so big, that betting on benevolent world is a leap or faith?
> Do you agree then that all those non-technological assumptions can be included in one's utility calculations...
Perhaps in theory. In practice I don't see this happening without turning into a religion. Even from the rational perspective, you don't really have enough knowledge to make a reasonably informed bet. From a rational perspective it's just buying a lottery ticket. But that's not the psychology of what's happening here. To me, your question sounds like: "so you don't agree that people would choose who they sleep with based on cold utilitarian estimates?" Well, maybe that's theoretically possible, and maybe some people can do that, but that doesn't happen in the general case, because human psychology is also very real.
I do not for one second believe that people can think about death and about options of spending resources to win an afterlife in a purely rational, utilitarian way. If you're saying that's how you think then either you're suffering from a mental disorder (I'm saying it in good humor) or you're not being honest with yourself. I don't think that cold calculation can trump fantasies of eternal life in a bright future. I think that there's no way such fantasies do not cloud your judgement, just as a pretty girl would make you do dumb stuff. That's just how we're wired. Once hope and emotion play a role in guiding your decision to act today based on the belief in a (positive) afterlife, you stop being a scientist and turn into a believer. But that's OK. Most of us, including scientists, are often religious (even if we don't ascribe to the omniscient-omnipotent-deity religious model). But we should realize that's what we're doing, and know when we've moved from the very earthly, Sisyphean, frustrating, limited, no-promises science to religion, where anything's possible.
There are people STILL TODAY who make a decent living as Mark Twain impersonators - imagine how well the original one could do if he went BACK on the live public speaking circuit! Mark Twain would also do great on Twitter or as a comedy TV writer. I expect that either Hemingway or Twain would be astounded at modern conveniences (starting with dentistry and showers) and would find no trouble amusing themselves in the new world. And here's the secret thing about reality television: if it DOES make you miserable you don't have to watch it!
(though come to think of it, Hemingway would be an interesting pick as a writer or script consultant for a long-form episodic TV show set in a suitable historical period. The same era that brought us reality TV ALSO brought us stuff like Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey.)
Exactly. The reason we don't have flying cars is not lack of technology, it is the economics. For the very same reason we don't have Moon bases yet. We could do this if we wanted, but there's not enough demand right now for it to happen.
I'll grant you that. "The state of mind and emotional investment" is indeed similar, and it is a rationality risk, because people may (and do) transplant religious memes to reasoning about this. Same with the Singularity, or even if you dive a bit into game theory and economics you might realize that the possible solutions to coordination problems start to look eerily similar to what Jehovah's Witnesses teach about how God wants humanity to work (honestly, I've been loosing some sleep over this myself). It's a danger, but it doesn't make cryonics religion.
Interesting -- yes; surprising -- not at all. After all, religions (whether true or not (there's only one true religion but I'm not going to tell you what it is)) serve the same deep human psychological needs. What I find curious about most versions of an afterlife is this: they all describe life without death, and some (including singularity) describe a pure spiritual (non-corporal) existence. Each of these things on its own -- let alone together -- makes that existence in the afterlife distinctly non human. Whatever we're reborn as, it's no longer human, but somehow it's not only us, but us as we'd want to exist. Note how religions that believe in reincarnation are different in that respect: they promise a constant re-birth but always in (at least hopefully) human form.
Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/
I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Anyway, I'd like to write down a regular epitaph:
Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014), second PGP developer after Zimmerman, first Bitcoin recipient, cypherpunk who wrote code.