April 2026
Being deep-frozen in the hope of future resuscitation is no longer science fiction. But does it work? If so, how do we define “death”? This was discussed at an international conference, yet the core philosophical question — whether the essence of a human actually resides in the body — was hanging in the air.
We have seen it in films such as “Sleeper,” “Alien,” and “Avatar.” People lie down in tightly sealed containers and enter “cryosleep,” to be defrosted and revived after several years. The phenomenon is no longer relegated to science fiction: The technology exists. The catch is that no one yet knows if it works.
The advance of cryonics, arguably one of the more salient expressions of the materialistic transhumanism movement, was the theme of an international conference at Stockholm’s Institute for Futures Studies. A special guest was James Arrowood, who is CEO of world-leading cryonics foundation Alcor.
Approximately 5,000 people have signed up for deep-freezing at –196 degrees Celsius when the time is right (in itself a tricky thing to know), with the hope of being resuscitated in some distant future. However, only some 600 people have actually been put into cryosleep. The price tag is around $200,000 for the whole body and $100,000 for the head only. The longest “surviving” cryonaut is James Bedford, whose body has remained stored in liquid nitrogen at Alcor since 1967.
“By preserving the physical structures that store our memories, our personality and our identity, cryonics aims to protect each patient until future medical advances overcome today’s limitations,” Alcor explains on its website.
The panelists at the conference discussed at length the medical and judicial definitions of death. Philosophers, futurists and biologists aired a number of practical issues that need to be addressed if and when the process is proven to work. For instance, how will family members be able to grieve when there is no body to bury or cremate, how will life insurance be handled, and what will happen to being married “’til death do us part”?
As readers of the FJN will know, consciousness research has advanced dramatically in recent years. A growing number of neuroscientists and psychiatrists have concluded that consciousness is nonphysical. Materialist science has tried for a century to locate the “consciousness neuron” — or the neural correlate of consciousness — in the brain, to no avail.
The FJN asked Arrowood how the latest hypotheses on consciousness, such as Roger Penrose’s and Stuart Hameroff’s Orch-OR, or the ones pertaining to panpsychism, might affect cryonics. The Alcor CEO said he had only vague knowledge about these theories but admitted that the research is “fascinating.”
Computer scientist and futurist Anders Sandberg, keynote speaker at the conference who has signed up for future cryonic treatment, was somewhat more up-to-date on the post-materialist hypotheses, yet he appeared firm in his materialist beliefs.
“Most people who are involved in cryonics tend to have a fairly clear materialistic view: We are our bodies, and if we manage to preserve the body, then we are preserved,” he said.
In fact, the question of where or how consciousness is produced was never raised by any of the experts at the conference. The underlying assumption was the materialist one: It must be in the brain, because, where else could that be?
If the cryonics community were to acknowledge the possibility that consciousness is nonphysical and that the essence of a human is independent of the physical body, the very basis for its business would collapse.
Written by Anders Bolling
Edited by Liza Horan
