X-Message-Number: 10042 Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 06:53:44 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10037 - #10041 Hi everyone! A kinda addendum to Paul Wakfer's comments re. evidence --- not disagreeing, really, but expanding upon them. The problem that cryonics simply cannot be evaluated validly by current medical and scientific standards is an important problem for us, and I believe a central one. It resembles the problem that any antiaging drug cannot be evaluated for its effectiveness in human beings by any currently accepted standard (cf. my previous comments on Cryonet, the one to which I am now replying). Both cases simply take too long --- yet they do not take as long as it might take to, say, evaluate a theory of stellar evolution. Fundamentally, truth (or whatever metaphysical notion may someday replace it) simply cannot depend on our features as human being: not our lifespans, certainly, nor the fact that we are made of proteins and other such chemicals, nor the condition of the Earth itself. Yet both cryonics and immortality, once we start thinking of actual treatments, show that current science has not yet freed itself from that human point of view. Paul and I may disagree upon how much of a problem this gives us in convincing others of our ideas, but the existence of the problem remains. As Mike Perry has done, we can try one way (as if the results of our activities will never reveal themselves) or the other (as if we can usefully do experiments lasting more than one present human lifetime). Neither is really very satisfactory. It may be much better if we took this problem on directly: just as we can argue that those now thought to be "dead" may not be, we might argue that the standard of scientific (or medical!) truth accepted today falls short of what we need to truly understand reality. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10042