X-Message-Number: 1088 Date: 31 Jul 92 23:58:56 EDT From: Charles Platt <> Subject: CRYONICS To: Kevin Brown Just this once, I can't agree with Steve Harris. His dismissal of the problem of fidelity to a frozen spouse is too easy. So long as we are in any sense human (i.e. so long as we retain all of our brains in some form, biological or electronic or whatever), I believe those old animal impulses for courtship and mating will survive; and I believe monogamy will survive with them. Steve says, see how much the family has changed already. But it hasn't, in fundamental terms! People still pair-bond, and they still sue for divorce over adultery. Twenty-five years ago, I knew dozens of people who believed that monogamy was dead. These people are now all married! Conservatism rules! The only polygamists and polyandrists are in tiny tight-knit groups way off the main stream. (I know; I used to read the magazines they produce.) I agree that if we look really far ahead, we should be able to download ourselves and edit silicon analogs of our brains. Maybe then we can excise jealousy with the same precision as we would remove a bug from a computer program. But I am not going to live my life right now on the absolute assumption that this will be possible. Therefore, if my spouse dies and is frozen, I will still be in a dilemma when it comes to getting reattached to someone else--especially if that person also decides to sign up. (And I do not accept Steve's suggestion that she would forgo her chance at immortality just because my previously wife is frozen.) I prefer Keith Henson's answer to the problem: when you come back, if your former wife and your second wife are both revived, just ask the scientists of tomorrow to run off an extra copy of yourself, so each of them has you to herself. But--this solves only their problem, not yours! Each copy of you would still be attracted to both women. But each of you would only be able to have one of them. The result, in fact, might be even more emotionally complicated and impossible to resolve, especially if both your revived selves preferred one woman over the other. The more I think about situations like this, the more I tend to believe that such things will be outlawed long before they are possible--and will be outlawed not by some fascist regime, but by popular demand of people at large, who have enough trouble grappling with personal problems as it is. --Charles Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1088