Doubtlessly some of you are aware that there are actual companies that offer the freezing of a corpse in the hope that at some point the damages could be fixed and that the dead could be brought back to life.
Indeed. I froze my mother a little under a year ago with Ettinger's original organization in Michigan, now known as the Cryonics Institute. There are at least 3 more groups.
. . . are they employed as control devices used for social engineering and economic dominance, much like the religious concept, are they primarily used for something completely different?
See Niven's story entitled, I believe "Rammer", for a control scenario.
Sure you might say that once we conquer death then we will have the answer to those; but how can you be so sure?
See "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler. Really, I'm surprised that book isn't mentioned in this thread. IMO it is one of the 2 most important books of the last century, not counting nasty ones like Mein Kampf or the little red one. It isn't just about nanotech. Drexler is a very serious thinker.
To say that consciousness is software running on the hardware of the brain is in my opinion utterly off the mark. An analogy would be: time, e.g. the notions of minutes or hours, is the software running off the hardware of a wristwatch, but "time" is not an entity that is conscious, as we are.
A totally unsound analogy IMO. Time exists independently of wrist watches for one thing. I rather suspect that resistance to the idea that the mind is comparable to a program springs from the same psychology that vitalism does, not that I'm accusing you of that. But I can't see any other view of the matter that doesn't boil down to mysticism. I don't pretend certainty about exactly how the program is encoded in the physical substrate of the brain, but either it is, or it is magic. I don't see any alternatives. Assuming it's NOT magic, there is no reason the logic and data can't be reproduced in another substrate. Complaining that the result isn't "you" is just a nomenclatural assertion making arbitrary qualities, such as uniqueness, or protein in water chemistry, a part of your definition of "you".
1. Population: This is twofold: a) if no one dies (other than accidentally) then we would instantly have a population boom b) if we either freeze all of a woman's ova after puberty or if we manage to persuade a woman's body to keep producing eggs (would women really want to continue menstruating ad infinitum?) then the population problem increases by an order of magnitude. The difficulty is that just because we have immortality we're not suddenly going to lose the urge to procreate.
Now that is an interesting one. Imagine a population in which all people live to be 100 years old and die. What is the maximum net reproduction rate that eventually leads to a stable population? Now imagine there is no death and ask the same question. Reason it out. The answer may surprise you.
What is dead? . . . I don't even want to think what our cavemen ancestors thought on the subject.
There is a tribal group, African if remember correctly, that traditionally believed that you shouldn't consider a person clearly dead until the buzzards begin to eat them. Which strikes me as laudably conservative.
First grow back a tail, maybe work on specialized hair or fur throughout the body. Maybe cats ears and eyes.
I'll take another pair of arms, please. I want to be a Thark when I grow up.
One of the problems in medical science is that the obvious approaches to reduce the effects of aging (growth factor augmentation, anti-apoptotic agents, etc) all tend to increase the prevalence of cancers.
Only SOME of the obvious approaches. For example, increasing endogenous production of enzymes like the SODs, catalase, glutathione reductase, etc. is more likely to have the opposite effect.
Why would there ever have been an evolutionary advantage to long life?
That touches an important point in the evolutionary theory of aging. The obvious answer is because you get more chances to reproduce. And although selection takes place on multiple levels, including genes and genera, the level of the individual is still predomninant. Basically, organisms tend to accumulate maintenance genes until there is no more payoff for doing so. Oversimplifying just a tad (and you can see the refinements needed pretty easily), that happens when the collection they have is good enough to keep them healthy longer than they are likely to live anyway. In a state of nature, every day you roll the dice, and sooner or later, somebody eats you, or the plague gets you, or a tree falls on your head. There is actual evidence for this, not just a priori reasoning. There is a population of raccoons on an island where they haven't had natural enemies for a long, long time. They don't age as nearly as fast as mainland coons.
. . . it might be unsettling if every time your children look in the mirror they find you staring out at them . . .
Especially if the mirror were on the ceiling.
But if 1,000 copies are made are all of them YOU?
At that instant, sure. But I'd suggest we all take new names, cause our "younesses" are rapidly diverging. That divergence isn't any different from my divergence from yesterday's me. It's just like the comparable problems imagined in time travel stories.
If you like the concept of a spaceship with a controlling consciousness there are plenty of examples, from Anne McCaffrey's brainship books to the game System Shock.
H. Beam Piper did some very nice, funny stories with this. Baen has collected them. The something-something Patrol. Galactic Patrol maybe? Smart ships that recruit their own crews.
