X-Message-Number: 10497 Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 09:50:36 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10491 - #10496 Hi everyone! In response to George Smith and Kellie Smith: I will state unequivocally that if the only thing we have of you is your skeleton, you are DEAD. I will say the same of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients, though they fade away rather than disappear immediately. And the same of someone whose cerebral cortex has been destroyed by a brain tumor. Yes, these are extreme cases, but I doubt very much that any future technology will be able to bring you back if the only remains of you it has to work on is your skeleton. The fundamental point of cryonics is not philosophy alone: if you want to do philosophy you can postulate all kinds of things which would allow us to revive your skeleton and have it be YOU. The fundamental point of cryonics comes from a conclusion that in virtually all cases, we do NOT have just a skeleton or the remains of someone whose cerebral cortex has been destroyed. This continues to be true even if our preservation methods also cause damage. I am well aware that many people think we are planning to revive the dead. I doubt very much that the best thing to do is to agree with them, especially since anyone we someday revive will not have been thought to be dead after we've revived them. That's exactly what happened when CPR became common: rather than deciding that those using CPR were reviving the "dead", people decided that those for whom CPR worked were never dead in the first place. And those convenient changes in the definition of "dead" themselves reinforce my point. Last time I heard, "death" was supposed to be some kind of absolute --- but even now we see new technology moving it about. That is a fundamental defect in the common notion of "death" itself. The best way to deal with it is to say that people are "dead" if no future technology can revive them, even millions of years into the future. Putting it another way, given cryonic suspension, you become more and more likely to be dead the more millenia pass while you remain in suspension. And no, if the only thing remaining of me was my skeleton, then I would say that I had died. And I would say the same of those with advanced Alzheimer's or Parkinson's Diseases, though my basis for saying so comes from knowledge about such conditions which is hardly as common as knowledge about the health of skeletons. There is a positive point here, too. If we accept that definition then it also means that we should NOT allow deterioration and damage whenever we know how to prevent it. That, of course, is just what happens with the standard notion of "dead": once someone has been ritually declared "dead", no further efforts are made to keep them from deteriorating still more. As cryonicists it's incumbent on us to preserve someone as well as we know how to do at the time... AND to find better ways to do so, too. Most especially, we DO NOT just decide that it is never time to give up and leave it at that. We should be much more active than that. If we are not, we fail to support not only ourselves but all future cryonics patients. If I am asked to explain astronomy to people who believe the Sun moves around the Earth, I would do much better to disabuse them of their false belief than to accept it, even for the sake of argument. If I do not do that, I swiftly become entangled in all kinds of quite unnecessary complexities. So too with explaining cryonics. Best and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10497