Alternatives to involuntary death PDF
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Alternatives to Involuntary Death Timothy Leary Ronin Publishing, Inc. Berkeley CA The cybernetic age offers a fascinating set of consumer choices suddenly appear on the pop-up menu of The Evolutionary Café. Alternatives to Involunatry Death Timothy Leary Alternatives to Involuntary Death Copyright 2009: The Futique Trust & Beverly A. Potter ISBN: 978-1-57951-087-9 Published by Ronin Publishing, Inc. PO Box 22900 Oakland, CA 94609 www.roninpub.com All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or trans- mitted in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or translating into another language, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permis- sion from the author or the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Production: Editor: Beverly A. Potter, Ph.D. Cover Design: Beverly A. Potter, Ph.D. Book Design: Beverly A. Potter, Ph.D. Fonts: Fornicator—Chank Diesel Goudy Old Style—URW Software Zekton—Ray Larabie Library of Congress Card Number: 2008942193 Distributed to the book trade by PGW/Perseus Derived in part from Chaos & Cyber Culture with additional content prepared by Beverly Potter Let’s be bold about opening up a broad spectrum of Club- Med post-biologic possibilities of re-creational dying. If you expect to be death when you die, you will be disappointed. —PMH Atwater You Don’t Die Ronin Books for Independent minds by Timothy Leary High Priest Chaos & Cyber Culture The Politics of Ecstasy Psychedelic Prayers Change Your Brain The Politics of Self-Determination Start Your Own Religion Your Brain Is God Turn On Tune In Drop Out Musings on Human Metamorphoses Evolutionary Agents The Politics of PsychoPharmacology The Fugitive Philosopher CyberPunks CyberFreedom Table of Contents 1.The Dying Process ..........................................9 2. Factory Assembly Line Death ......................19 3. Re-Creational Dying ....................................27 4. Demystify Dying ...........................................37 5. Achieving Immortality ................................42 6. Re-Creational Alternatives to Involuntary Irreversible Metabolic Coma .......................45 7. Life Extension Diet ......................................53 8. Lifestyle ........................................................61 9. Somatic-Neural-Genetic Preservation ........69 10. Electronic Immortality ...............................72 11. Brain-Computer Transfer ...........................77 12. Re-Creational Reprogramming .................86 13. Mummification ..........................................91 14. Voluntary Dying .........................................95 15. Cloning ....................................................101 16. Pre-Mortem Hibernation .........................104 17. Celebrating Andy ....................................114 18. Timothy Leary’s 23 Skidoo.......................123 Author Bio .....................................................126 Ronin Books-for-Independent-Minds ...........127 Death is life’s greatest event. —Timothy Leary 1 The Dying Process Most human beings face death with an at- titude of helplessness, either resigned or fear- ful. Neither of these submissive, uninformed “an- gles of approach” to the most crucial event of one’s life are ennobling. We’ve been schooled and coun- seled—programmed to act out life scripts based on our worst tendencies toward fear and self-doubt. I’ve been looking forward to dying all my life. Dying is the most fascinating experi- ence in life. You’ve got to approach dying the way you live your life—with curiosity, hope, experimentation, and with the help of your friends. —Timothy Leary Design for Dying There are many practical options and methods available for navigating the dying process. Passivity, failure to learn about them, might be the ultimate irretrievable blunder. Pascal’s famous no-lose wager about the existence of God translates into modern life as a no-risk gamble on the prowess of technology. 10 Timothy Leary Pascal’s Wager Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, theo- logian, mathematician and physicist with signif- icant contributions to science. He invented the syringe and helped to create the barometer—an early calculator, as well as contributing to the de- velopment of modern probability theory. Pascal’s Wager is a pragmatic rather than an evi- dential argument for belief in God. The argument pre- supposes an agnosticism, which is the view that it is impossible to either prove or disprove God’s existence. The theistic tradition holds that our ability to comprehend God is limited because our concepts are derived from our experiences, and our experi- ences are of flawed and finite existence. Thus we lack the conceptual tools necessary to understand what God is really like. Pascal argued that because we are unable to deter- mine by reason whether or not God exists, we should base our belief on self-interest. We should play it safe by believing in God and living out a Christian life. Submission to Authority For millennia the fear of death has depreciated in- dividual confidence and increased dependence on au- thority. True, the loyal members of a familial or racial gene pool can take pride in the successes and survival tenacity of their kinship. For example, around the year 1600, at the height of the obedient, feudal stage Chinese philosopher, Li Zhi, wrote a revealing essay outlining five ways to die.
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