One of the mysterious things about cryonics is that some of the arguments that are invoked against it would be considered ridiculous, or even insensitive, if they would be raised in the context of other live-saving technologies. As Alcor member Mark Plus writes:

Why do we call engineering efforts to solve a hard problem which haven’t worked so far “failures,” while some people call cryonics’ attempts at intervening into the death process “denial”?

The difference seems to involve a double standard. We don’t call other efforts to save human life “denial” when they don’t work in some cases, and not just in a medical context. The effort to rescue those trapped miners in Chile may not work, for example; but nobody I know of calls the rescue project “denial,” wants to stop it as a waste of resources, and admonishes the doomed miners to “Get over yourselves,” as one of Ted Williams’s relatives has said to cryonicists.

The same goes for medicine in general. How would we react if authority figures scolded us for seeking health care for serious illnesses or injuries, saying that we should instead deal with our “denial” and “fear of death” issues through, say, strength of character, rather than trying to stay alive and functional through modern medicine? Even opponents of recent political efforts to “reform” American health care haven’t gone that far, to the best of my knowledge.

Read his complete post here.