If a person went into cryonic suspension, when are they considered dead? If they were suspended for 10 years, then revived and lived for 50 years, would they have been considered dead before they were suspended? What about if they were suspended for 400 years? 10,000?
What’s the difference between being suspended for 10,000 years or never being revived at all from a spiritual standpoint? What happens to the soul while in suspension? If the soul stays in the body (and thus the person can be revived), and they are never revived, is their soul never “released”? Is that true spiritual annihilation for the believer?
Of course, if the soul is the mind, it makes the issue quite a bit simpler.
to a believer the body would probably be destroyed in Armageddon anyway, so the soul would be released then.
to a non-believer, it doesn’t matter. it’s life that matters, not what comes after. plus cryogenic freezing is a long way off technologically.
Yeah, and what about people in suitably deep coma’s? It is very easy to show that some of most of them (I have no access to the relevant numbers) are damaged enough not to show any brain activity above simple reflexes. Where is their soul?
Well, if God is omniscient, wouldn’t He know whether the body will ever be reanimated and apply whatever soul-taking rule he has that apply to the situation at hand?
@Immortality: Perhaps, but that is one big “if”!
Guys, cryonic storage isn’t that far off, really. We’re getting closer and closer. There is a way to prevent loss of the data int he brain, it’s currently impossible to revive the patients. I do plan to store myself, but what I see as more important than whether or not I’m dead is when I am revived am I the same me as shortly before the moment of death.
For example, if in the future they can copy matter if they created another copy of the me in storage, which one of them is me when they are revived? In this case you could say they are both me, but the illusion of linear and connected consciousness is broken as they both have the same memories and both think they are me, but only one is the original, but since both were out, it doesn’t make a difference as they both act the same.
The issue with this is they could just recreate a person and ignore the original. Then I truly would not be the same one, and death would be true. If you’ve seen The Prestige with the duplicating machine, this question is also brought up, though not explicitly.
Of course if I believed in a soul there would be more problems, such as a duplication of the soul, or the destruction of the original and the recreation into my new version.
Also, if souls exist, why must they be limited to being here? Why couldn’t God just keep them with itself at all times, and then when not in waking states you are with God? It would explain dreams to people without science, as God is infinite to them and thus the unpredictability of dreams. Also why would souls be limited to physical places? We’ve already formally shown that they don’t exist as an organ or some such and are something else entirely, so why are they limited in space and time? These kind of strange things turn me off from religion.