I like to read Scott Alexander's Astral Codex Ten Substack newsletter, and the November Links issue caught my eye with this item:
"20: Getting your brain cryogenically frozen after your death is now free."
The item links to "Cryonics is free," a blog posting by Mati Roy at the LessWrong blog.
The article relates that brain preservation is available free from Oregon Brain Preservation on the west coast of the U.S. in northern California, Oregon and Washington and for people living in Germany. There is some discussion in the comments about whether the free Oregon Brain Preservation method is just as good as traditional cryonics. "I think both of those organizations can help coordinate remote cases with local thanatologists as well," Roy writes.
Of course, I noticed all this because in the first Cosmic Trigger book, Robert Anton Wilson relates the brutal murder of his teenage daughter Luna, and how his friends helped cover the cost of the cryogenic freezing of Luna's brain, in hopes that someday she might be brought back alive again.
I tried back in 2015 to find out if Luna Wilson's brain is still frozen somewhere but didn't really get a definite answer. All I found out was that when RAW's wife Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999, RAW stopped paying many of his bills.
Chapel Perilous, the new RAW biography by Gabriel Kennedy, doesn't really answer the question, either. Luna died in 1976 and the biography says, "Wilson continued to pay Trans-Time to keep Luna's brain frozen for at least another twenty years." (Page 205).
Apparently there was no attempt to do cryopreservation for either of Luna's parents.
Also, here is Iain Spence's 2020 review at this blog of By the Forces of Gravity, a memoir about Luna Wilson by Rebecca Fish Ewan.
4 comments:
The whole brain-in-a-vat thing seems a terribly short sighted vision from heady intellectuals who ignored the importance of the body in mind-body consciousness. Descartes' Error.
I was not aware of the Rebecca Fish Ewan book, it looks very interesting. Thank you for bringing it up.
I read By The Forces of Gravity when it came out. Kinda weird there's a book about Luna, like how Thornley wrote about Oswald before the JFK hit. The odds seem against this. Anyway...
Clearly the Wilson kids were the ultimate "free range" rovers. And supposedly Graham and Luna did LSD before they were teenagers, but man: Rebecca Fish Ewan loved and idolized Luna, who seems like a total free spirit. Luna comes off as a creative, curious, charismatic, smart, sweet kid.
I've noticed there are reasonably-priced paperbacks, even though a Kindle never came out. I will belatedly hunt up a copy. And yes, it was a surprise to me when the book came out.
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