that medical science will one day know
how to revive and cure them. There are
believed to be a few hundred people
frozen in this way in facilities across
the United States and elsewhere. (No,
Walt Disney isn’t one of them; that’s
an urban myth.)
In jurisdictions where it’s permit-
ted at all, cryonic preservation is only
legal once the patient has been declared
dead. But if it’s intrinsic to the concept
of death that it is irreversible, then we
have a deeper problem: are these people
dead at present, or alive? If cryonics ful-
fils its promise and these patients can
be revived someday, then it will turn
out they were never dead and are in fact
alive right now, even though their bod-
ies were in the same state as other dead
people before freezing.
If we want to insist that they re-
ally are dead, on the other hand, then
cryonics cannot work even if it does: ab-
surdly, we’d have to regard any future
revived people as being dead. Say the
future is not causally determined: does
that mean whether a cryonics patient is
alive or dead now is somehow indeter-
minate? In any case, how can it be that
whether someone is alive or dead de-
pends not on the current condition of
their body, but on what happens dec-
ades or even centuries from now? How
can ‘dead’ be a relational property in this
way, rather than an intrinsic property of
bodies?
New technologies have an un-
comfortable knack of upending the
concepts and scales we use to anchor
ourselves to biological reality. De-
spite the hopes of those now lying in
cold storage, science might not defeat
death, yet it may make its boundaries
drastically more complicated. But the
underlying messiness will have been
there all along – as we were taught
seventy years ago by a headless rock
star chicken named Mike.
NewPhilosopher Miracle Mike, the headless chicken