[ExI] Ilsa Bartlett comments about our cryonics thread

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Sat May 22 14:53:54 UTC 2010


On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:27 PM, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>wrote:

> desires.  Imagine that you have no legal say once you are DEAD!
>
> My daughter told me that I can say anything I want, but that she would
> do what she wants, once I am dead.  But in my hospice training I was
> taught the actual law that makes my daughter's words the legal truth!
> You can check this on the Zen hospice website or with any hospital.
> How is it that the Extropes think Alcor is beyond the same laws that
> makes the power of attorney stronger than a will or contract?
>

So there is even more reason to try to avoid the legal status of dead.

Suppose I am a member of an organization who is legally empowered to act on
that organization's behalf and I sign a contract with a vendor to provide
services (ex: catering or cleaning service).  After that contract is signed,
I leave that organization.  Is the contract void because I left?  Seems
obvious that is an absurd expectation.  So if I am a member of the living
who contracts service from a preservation service provider, why is my
contract expected to be void simply because I am no longer a member of the
living?

Assuming that the dead have no rights nullifies estate law and any reason to
have a Will.  Without a legal document stating my intention for what to do
with all the stuff I acquire in life, my neighbors might well claim to have
rights to my possessions.  With that legal document there is an expectation
that my intentions will be honored by authority of that contract.  If i
create a trust for the beautification of a local park and fund it with
$100k, do my surviving family have the right to consume those funds and
ignore the park?  I have no idea what the law says on that.  It might be
that wills are executed primarily due to the living's respect for the
recently deceased - and that any disrespectful party can violate that
societal convention.  If that's true though, society loses a great deal of
order and becomes a primitive grab for whatever I can no longer control.

I think the perspective of a Buddhist Chaplain will lean towards a
philosophical unattachment to material wealth.  If the body is viewed as a
primary material possession then leaving the body behind would be a
testimony towards the value of (mere) things.  I have to imagine there is
some appreciation for the rules of our material world to have
value-for-value exchange of goods even when it is a distraction from a
higher purpose.

On the idea of the body as the primary physical presence to secure rights in
the physical world, does one relinquish all other physical assets by
uploading to a non-corporeal "cloud-based" existence?  I don't think our
laws are currently able to answer these questions; precedence has not been
set.
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