At the weekend I began reading Plato’s Republic, and was disappointed on many levels to find the narration, in the voice of Socrates, irritating almost beyond acceptance. I kept allowing the book to drop in my lap as I groaned and moaned about the pointlessness of what I was reading. Socrates was arguing with a local about justice and the just man. “What surprised me,” Socrates says to Thrasymachus, “was that you rank injustice with wisdom and excellence, and justice with their opposites.”

“Yet that is what I do,” Thrasymachus replies. As the argument went back and forth I was irritated on two levels. Sure, by all means spend some time in dialogue with somebody whose values are clearly flawed, but after 17 pages of meandering reasoning I found I had a desire to tap Plato’s Socrates on the shoulder and put a few questions of my own to him. Chiefly, “Why are you still talking to this fool?” There’s no helping the man. At the same time, I wondered which was more offensive, the ignorance of Thrasymachus or the smugness of Socrates. I found myself wanting to trade the tap on the shoulder for a swift kick in the pellets.

The narrator’s continually smug, holier than thou attitude to educating the misguided, along with his unappeasable appetite for analogy, did remind me of another, living philosopher that I once had the displeasure of coming across. He was arguing for the feasibility of cryonics – the study or practice of keeping a newly dead body at an extremely low temperature in the hope of restoring it to life at a later date with the aid of future, as yet undeveloped medical advances – on behalf of a company offering the very service.

The people of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation foresee a future where cryonics is a natural choice. Instead of being buried or cremated it will be just as natural to be packed into an arctic cylinder full of liquid nitrogen. Their booklet ‘Alcor Life Extension Foundation – An Introduction by Jerry B. Lemler, M.D.’ is packed with credible titles, filled with Ph.D. Tom and M.D. Harry, who are on hand to bring credibility to the topic. But alarm bells ring loud throughout the brochure. The first is the reference to Alcor members as being ‘Alcorians’. I am not about to accuse Alcor of being a religious cult (nor will I suggest their logo more fitting for a publisher of science fiction), but surely anybody alive in the last thirty years can name a few cults that sound uncannily like ‘Alcorians.’ The tag suggests that Alcor are aiming themselves at assorted nut jobs. And rich ones at that.

Dr Lemler is quick to list his acquainted Ph.Ds., but from where I sit it doesn’t take an eight-year education followed by five years of research to understand that by calling your members ‘Alcorians’ you are begging to be harangued and mocked.

But much worse than this little oversight is the use of philosophical twaddle.

Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph.D. uses a compelling analogy involving an automobile, writes Dr Lemler.

“If we say a car has the capacity to move at 110mph, we mean that it is currently in a state such that, given appropriate stimuli (such as gas, a foot on the accelerator etc), it will achieve 110 mph. The objection claims that we don’t mean that the car could achieve 110 mph given available technology, and we don’t mean that, given some empirically possible but non-actual technology, the car could achieve 110 mph. The problem with the objection lies in the fuzziness of the terms ‘capacity’ and ‘appropriate stimuli.”   

Mr. Eminent Extropian Philosopher and Alcor Member Max More, Ph.D. (who with such a name could also moonlight as a porn star and/or news anchor) just told us… well, nothing! What he did do was use an awful lot of words to promote his branch of death as an industry. He tried the old bamboozle technique. Say it, say it again and again and then slip in an analogy that, well, by the mere fact of it being so incompatible with what your talking about can’t really be called an analogy at all. He talks of disconnected wires, about how capacity can be restored by reattaching the wire. Sure, but how many human beings have you seen in the street immobilized by a loose wire? But the analogy gets thinner: what if the car is broken and there is no current technology that can fix it? “Further suppose that the manufacturer tells you that they are working on a new repair process that will restore function, a process that should be available a month from now.” Yes, I can further suppose until the cows come home, I just can’t get myself to further suppose all the way to accepting that a broken-down car is in anyway comparable to a dead body. The car is an inanimate object, and, aside from this Eminent Extropian Philosopher’s attempt to convince otherwise, the human being is not inanimate. Mr. Ph.D. rounds up with, “The car analogy, then, supports rather than undermines the case for basing a criterion for death on irreversible loss of capacity rather than currently irreversible loss of capacity.”

Seriously!? Appropriate stimuli indeed!? If the “problem lies” in the “fuzziness” of the terms “capacity” and “appropriate stimuli,” Mr. Eminent, I suggest you don’t use the terms capacity and appropriate stimuli, they were, after all, if I am not mistaken, your own words.

Even without such stupidity in branding and philosophy, I would need to see some radical improvement in human behavior before I ever thought this planet worth a second stint. If I could be packed off somewhere else, never heard of, never seen, for better or worse, it would be worth a gamble. But the way planet earth is going? Meh! No, thanks!

The only reason would be to see how the kids are doing. But what if you don’t come back for 200 years, which from where we stand now would appear an optimistic time frame? The children will be long gone. Sure, one would hope for a generational trail, but what are you going to do, knock on the family home and announce, “I used to live here!”?

Can you imagine the scene? Some couples find it hard enough to accept each other’s in-laws in the now, but imagine if said in-laws were several hundred years old.

The chances of your actually being wanted in 300 years’ time are slim. Sure, you’ll be wheeled out at first for cocktail parties and after-dinner speeches, but what of you then? Once the novelty value wears off you’ll be cast aside like any other aging fool. Only it will be easier to dispense with you because nobody will have any emotional connection to you. You never bounced them on your knee or took them out for ice cream. For the last 300 years you were a fucking ice cream. All you did was thaw out one day and turn up.

What other reasons could there be for coming back? A loved one? You could be vitrified together and reborn together. But most people can barely keep a marriage together for one lifetime, so two lifetimes of marriage to the same person? I fear there would be no surprises left.

Nah! I think myself, and luckily the Extropian Philosopher too, will only be getting one innings. And, I suppose now I have got this rant out of my system, I shall return to Plato and his Socrates and attempt to learn something that might be useful as I meander towards my end. At least Socrates keeps it simple. He does get there in the end, and it is very hard to disagree with him. I just wish he wouldn’t toy with his prey so much. It’s like watching one of those zombifying wasps plunge its stinger through a cockroach’s exoskeleton and into its brain. Only Socrates is not doing this so he may lay his larvae inside Thrasymachus, where his hatched philosopher offspring will eat Thrasymachus from the inside out. Any ‘just’ motive Socrates has, if we are to examine his technique and tone, appear secondary. Socrates slowly maneuvers Thrasymachus for the kill. I can’t help but imagine him flashing a wry smile to his friends that are gathered for the scene. The 'just man' indeed.