Should I be preparing for my death, or trying to avoid it?

What the experts say

BJ MillerMD · hospice and palliative medicine physician, not currently practising clinically

Prepare. Death is not a solvable problem, and the available work is to make the ending less bad and more yours.

What it rests onClinical observation across a hospice and palliative career, plus his own experience as a patient. He is explicit that this is a position rather than a finding, and refuses to impose it: the only question, he writes, is whether your view of death serves you and those you love well.

Source: ted.com ↗

Max MorePhD philosophy · cryonics advocate, former Alcor president and CEO

Avoid it, and make the arrangements first. Cryopreservation is not a backup plan, it is the plan you make before any other.

What it rests onAn argument about decision order under uncertainty, plus the claim that the brain retains structure for hours after cardiac arrest and that much of the damage attributed to oxygen loss is reperfusion injury. He does not claim a probability: he states that the odds cannot be objectively calculated.

Source: biostasis.substack.com ↗

Overview

They are not talking to the same person. Miller writes for someone who already has a serious diagnosis, or who is caring for someone who does, and for whom the question is what the next months look like. More writes for a healthy person with money and decades of decisions ahead, for whom the question is how to hedge. Almost nothing either one says applies cleanly to the other's reader.

Where they agree

Both reject the standard framing that legal death is a simple biological fact, and both spend most of their argument on the language rather than the biology. Both hold that the subject is avoided for psychological rather than rational reasons and that avoidance costs people something real.

Both explicitly decline to tell an individual what to choose: Miller says he would impose no judgment, More says the decision is a highly personal one and that many people are reasonably deterred.

What would settle it

For Miller, a demonstrated revival of a cryopreserved mammalian brain with recognisable function would move it, and he has never said otherwise. For More, the honest answer is his own: he holds that the odds cannot be calculated, so nothing short of a demonstration settles it, and the failure modes he himself catalogues (organisational collapse, underfunding, family opposition) are the near-term evidence to watch.

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