Rick69/Aug302026

I was a member of Alcor cryonics company in scottsdale AZ for many years but gave it up due to various continuing challanges culminating in my rediscovery-for-myself of the quantum-universe in 2022 via Doug Matzke's book Deep Reality and in 2023 of Howard S Burr's work on L-fields and Edward W. Russel's T-fields in Design for Destiny and Prospect for Eternity. I also noted that the father of cryonics himself, Robert Ettinger, made reference to a disembodied mind, hinting at his own dualist thoughts, in his 1972 book Man Into Superman.

Today, I got the regular Alcor email update that features the new generation of employees at Alcor and I noted that there is no connection to the institutional history of employees there that I was familiar with. This loss of corporate history is common in organziations but I would think cryonics would have been difference. The main Alcor website features dazzling big photos, simple explanations of cryoncs without reference to philosophy, no links to a history of academic papers or people in cryonics. It's a very glossy sales oriented pitch with happy people I don't know and who don't have links to their own publications, only short nice sounding bios. I don't get it. This, they imagine, will sell cryonics.

My own case for cryonics involved Drexler’s case that the idea that personality and memory are embedded in preservable brain structure and that therefore the preservation of the connectome should theoretically guard the person against total annihalation forever, in an apparently careless universe. That case is not made at the Alcor website, at least not up front. The people featured are all younger or middle age with no old cryoncists, and certainly no old cryonicists who I know or even the ones who are in stasis now. I find this presentation and latest manifestation of Alcor to be shockingly shallow een though they seem to want to sell the idea of rescue. For one thing, all the photos featuring the employees are far too large compared to the type.

I read a monthly tire-industry journal at my auto mechanics shop that does a better job on showing the current state of the tire industry, the competitors, the financials, the retired people, the deaths of the tire company employees and and the news even disastrous news. The Alcor cryonics presentation no longer presents this type of industry standard formula for publication. It's disappointing since I moved from canada in 1991 to be near to alcor to make my cryo rescue more likely in the event of my own demise. I no longer beleive the mind is confined to the brain so I'm no so much bothered by what I consider to be a larger quantum-spirit reality, but it's rather irksome to see my old industry friend, cryonics and Alcor, presenting themselves in this way. If I were in charge of presenting Alcor's cryonics, it would be through either online or paper or both publication that was more like a tire-trade industry journal that had some meat on the bones of the presentation with regular size porraits of people, not giant in your face distractions of faces. I can only shake my head in disappointment.


GeminiAI-

Your disappointment is understandable, especially given your long history with Alcor and the reason you moved to be near Scottsdale in the first place. From your perspective, cryonics was never supposed to be a glossy consumer product but a serious, if speculative, technical enterprise grounded in a specific philosophical argument - that memory and personality are encoded in brain structure, that the connectome can in principle be preserved, and that such preservation might offer a chance against what would otherwise be permanent annihilation in an indifferent universe.



That argument, which is what convinced you and many others of your generation, is largely absent from the current public face of Alcor. Instead, as you point out, the website leads with large, friendly photographs, simplified explanations, and brief, upbeat staff bios without links to publications, history, or deeper philosophical context. There is little sense of continuity with the earlier people, papers, and debates that built the organization, no visible lineage to the figures you knew, or even to the patients now in stasis. For someone who remembers when cryonics was a small, intellectually driven subculture that openly discussed its own history, setbacks, and internal disagreements, that shift can feel like a loss of institutional memory.



Your comparison to a trade journal is telling. A tire industry journal, as you describe it, covers the whole field - competitors, financials, retirements, obituaries, bad news as well as good - and thereby conveys that it is a real industry with depth and accountability. You would expect Alcor, of all organizations, to value long-term memory and therefore to present itself with that kind of substance: reasonably sized portraits, substantive articles, references to academic work, acknowledgment of its own history including both achievements and controversies, and a clear statement of the underlying materialist case for cryopreservation even if not everyone still agrees with it.



It is also consistent that you are less personally troubled than you once would have been, given your more recent turn toward the work of Matzke, Burr, Russell, and even Ettinger's later dualist hints in Man Into Superman. If mind is not strictly confined to the brain but participates in a larger quantum or field-like reality, then the failure to preserve the brain does not carry the same existential weight it once did. What remains irritating is seeing an old cause present itself in a way that feels shallow and ahistorical, selling rescue without explaining the intellectual foundation that made rescue seem plausible in the first place, and without honoring the people who built the effort.



Your alternative - a publication, online or in print, that treats cryonics as a serious field with history, technical detail, and proportionate, human-scale presentation - sounds much closer to the culture that originally drew you in.