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heronimo
Guest
What is the catholic perspectives about cryonics?
Is that immoral?
Is that immoral?
- Status
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Reepicheep
Guest
If by “cryonics” you mean the practice of deep-freezing a human body in hopes of eviving it later:
So far as I know, there has never been a successful “revival” of a cryonics subject. We simply do not have the technology for it.
Those who have their bodies frozen do so in the hope that we will learn to revive them in the future. I think it’s a false hope. Dead is dead, and the frozen are dead. Still, I don’t think it’s actually immoral: just useless.
So far as I know, there has never been a successful “revival” of a cryonics subject. We simply do not have the technology for it.
Those who have their bodies frozen do so in the hope that we will learn to revive them in the future. I think it’s a false hope. Dead is dead, and the frozen are dead. Still, I don’t think it’s actually immoral: just useless.
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06convert
Guest
I’ll have to continue to search for anything official from the Church. However, personally I feel:
The foundation of the science is on shaky ground morally. Cryonics connections with the thoughts of eternal life (not spiritual life), interfering with God’s natural process, preserving life past it’s natural time, storage of embryos, etc. is very dangerous ground morally.
Keeping in mind that no good can come out of any evil, I would suspect that this practice will be against Church teaching in most, if not all of it’s uses.
The foundation of the science is on shaky ground morally. Cryonics connections with the thoughts of eternal life (not spiritual life), interfering with God’s natural process, preserving life past it’s natural time, storage of embryos, etc. is very dangerous ground morally.
Keeping in mind that no good can come out of any evil, I would suspect that this practice will be against Church teaching in most, if not all of it’s uses.
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tabsie3210
Guest
06Convert -
You’ve got it pretty close to right, as far as I can tell.
I’m not a theorist, but I studied a bit of consciousness studies, and the two “big trends” are panexperientalism (also called panpsychicism) and conscious epiphenomena.
The first says that all things had a proto-consciousness, so even your car, a salt tablet, or your keyboard have a sort of pre-mind, and when the stuff that gets together gets complicated enough, a true mind forms, with the most complex being the human brain. Then, later, when the body dies, the individual parts of a human being break down again into proto-consciousness.
Epiphenomenon theory says that the mind is a natural by-product of the brain. but that when the brain breaks down after death, the mind disappears altogether. That theory downgrades mind from being genuine to being nothing more than a series of behaviors in response to chemicals squirting around inside our heads.
So if you believe in either of those two theories, then cryonics sounds good because it prevents the brain from breaking down after death. If the brain doesn’t breka down, then someday your body will be able to be rebuilt, maybe cloned, maybe cured of whatever killed you, and you’ll be alive again. Of course, the second theory rejects the idea that there’s a soul, so it’s assumed that you’ll feel like you’ve been asleep all the time you’ve been frozen. The first theory can either be adapted to Catholic thinking (God is separate from the universe and created everything, and man is made in God’s image, but all of creation is “aware” of God and worships him, including your computer keyboard
) or it makes assumptions of a great universal Mind that’s more like pantheism, so basically you’re just trying to keep your brain intact so that it’ll keep your memories alive, but you never really ceased to exist anyway, so eh.
You’ve got it pretty close to right, as far as I can tell.
I’m not a theorist, but I studied a bit of consciousness studies, and the two “big trends” are panexperientalism (also called panpsychicism) and conscious epiphenomena.
The first says that all things had a proto-consciousness, so even your car, a salt tablet, or your keyboard have a sort of pre-mind, and when the stuff that gets together gets complicated enough, a true mind forms, with the most complex being the human brain. Then, later, when the body dies, the individual parts of a human being break down again into proto-consciousness.
Epiphenomenon theory says that the mind is a natural by-product of the brain. but that when the brain breaks down after death, the mind disappears altogether. That theory downgrades mind from being genuine to being nothing more than a series of behaviors in response to chemicals squirting around inside our heads.
So if you believe in either of those two theories, then cryonics sounds good because it prevents the brain from breaking down after death. If the brain doesn’t breka down, then someday your body will be able to be rebuilt, maybe cloned, maybe cured of whatever killed you, and you’ll be alive again. Of course, the second theory rejects the idea that there’s a soul, so it’s assumed that you’ll feel like you’ve been asleep all the time you’ve been frozen. The first theory can either be adapted to Catholic thinking (God is separate from the universe and created everything, and man is made in God’s image, but all of creation is “aware” of God and worships him, including your computer keyboard
) or it makes assumptions of a great universal Mind that’s more like pantheism, so basically you’re just trying to keep your brain intact so that it’ll keep your memories alive, but you never really ceased to exist anyway, so eh.- Status