X-Message-Number: 11720
From: 
Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 12:30:18 EDT
Subject: On Certain Irrelevant Posts

Recently Mr Charles Platt took his leave of Cryonet with, as he put it, 
"relish".  His reason being that posts to Cryonet were not relevant - not 
about subjects he considered worth talking about.  His relevant solution
was  to guarantee that such subjects won't be talked about, since he
himself won't  show up to talk about them.   

Mr Mike Darwin, after not writing for two years, elected to follow Mr
Platt  into monastic silence, but first turned up to inform us at length
that  (surprise!) brain damage from current cryosuspension is massive,
although,  "The technology to vastly decrease both ischemic damage and
cryoinjury now  exists and is implementable in a cost-effective fashion.
It will NOT be used   arguably it will not be used on anybody for a long
while yet. My dog  Cannibal may be the first to get it, and he unarguably
deserves it more than  the vast majority of the rest of you.  With a
handful of exceptions, only  people such as Saul Kent, Bill Faloon, and
the stalwarts that have worked,  and supported the work, to make these
advances are the only other people  remotely deserving of benefit from
them."  

That Mr Darwin may have come up with a real advance in avoiding brain
damage  to suspension patients is fine; that he won't tell anyone exactly
what it is  till the patents are sorted out is perhaps not so fine.  Even
less fine is  what sounded to me like the implication in his post that
current ischemic  damage is so extensive that it can't be repaired.  Says
who?  Other  scientists who have examined the issue - most notably Ralph
Merkle and Eric  Drexler - believe that it can. Darwin is perhaps failing
to make a  distinction between the avoidance of ischemic damage (his
specialty), and the  repair of ischemic damage - the latter being
(admittedly) a topic very few  people indeed have worked on, Mike Darwin
not I think being one of them.  

Of course that doesn't obscure his general point.  Obviously it is better
to  get hit by a car in front of the Emergency Room at 21st Century
Medicine than  in the dark on a backwoods road.  But the fact is, people
sometimes get hit  by cars in the dark on backwoods roads, and lie there
for days.  And  nonetheless live.  Medical help doesn't always have to be
perfect, certain,  and instantaneous to work -- though it certainly
doesn't hurt, and surely is  worth aiming at.  But he forgets that the
Ideal is the enemy of the Good; Mr  Darwin seems to want perfection at
once, reversible cryostasis now, not a  decade from now, and sensing it
within his grasp he seems content to imply  that without his particular
innovation (whatever it is), the current  cryostasis patient has no chance
whatsoever.  That's one man's opinion; but  it's not the opinion of other
men, who are (to say the least) as expert in  their fields as Darwin is in
his.  

And so I would rank the relevance of Mr Darwin's as below even that of Mr 
Platt's non-posts.  How relevant is it to tell people their efforts to
live  are useless?  'One day' Mr Darwin & Company will shower their
blessings on  us; but anyone who dies prior to that day has no chance
whatsoever.  Small  comfort to Dora Kent, eh?  No, that sort of post has
little relevance indeed;  its pessimism isn't proven or provable or
supported by a number of other  cryonics writers with extensive
backgrounds in cryobiology and nanotech.   Let's cryopreserve those whom
we can, and give Moore's Law another thirty or  fifty years, and see what
things looks like then.  

Regarding the Turing Test:  yes, it matters not a bit to cryonics, but
(like  mind uploading) as long as talk about it does no damage to the
movement or  turns no one off about cryonics, why not talk about it?  
I've always thought  of it as the Turing Female Impersonator Test, myself.
The T.F.I.T. asserts  that if a female impersonator can convince you over
a glass of port for ten  minutes that he's a girl, then by God he is a
girl!  This proposition must  make for surprising honeymoons.  I think the
real question is an anti-Turing  Test:  can a computer that is not
conscious in the least convince a human  being that it is?  I think the
answer there is a clear yes -- that Turing's  Test (in short) is not about
machine consciousness but about human  gullibility.  But its secret appeal
is that it's also a sly form of (Blaise)  Pascal's Wager too, and that's
the real problem - if a machine were to say to  us, "Wait!  I'm as
conscious as you are!  Please:  don't turn me off!", would  we feel
obliged to give it the benefit of the doubt?  I have to admit I would.  

Nonetheless, the person to read on consciousness is not Turing but the
(alas,  nearly unreadable) G.I. Gurdjieff, for his insight that
consciousness is not  a digital either-or phenomenon, but one of grades,
shades, and degrees.  We  aren't very conscious when we're asleep or dead
drunk or just waking up; we  are conscious (some of us) when we post to
Cryonet, read a book,  philosophize.  We run the spectrum from stupor to
alertness, and to call it  all 'consciousness' is like calling the
infinite gradations of color in the  sea 'blue'.  That's both true, and
terribly inaccurate.  My own view is that  a form of machine consciousness
will eventually develop for a simple reason  -- neural implants.  If
machine awareness requires a biological component, I  expect they'll get
it - a bit of cortex for a spiritual hearing aid, not  unlike the
technological one we meat puppets sport.  

One last remark on relevance:  

Thomas Nord (perhaps quoting someone else - it wasn't entirely clear from
the  quote) concluded his post with:  

>Would you like a better chance than Jesus to return? Click on
>http://homepages.go.com/~cryonics1/index.html   

Now this is the sort of thing that really is depressing about Cryonet.  
Implying that only Mike Darwin can give us the Holy Grail of reversible 
cryosuspension is tolerable; hearing Charles Platt bitch is amusing; 
discussing Turing and mind uploading is not terribly relevant but does no 
actual damage; but what good does making cracks about Christ do anyone? 
Is  anyone really going to sign on to cryonics because he believes
TransTime  gives him better odds than God? This is the sort of gratuitous
remark that  does the cryonics movement no good, but that can and does
offend readers and  potential members, and makes potential enemies.  And
all those in no small  number.  

The fact is that (according to the World Almanac) there are roughly 
301,000,000 people in North America and Canada, and only slightly over 
1,000,000 of them are atheists - ie about 0.3% of our potential
membership.   Nonetheless we go out of our way to aggravate the 99.7% of
our population  that belong, however tentatively or foolishly, to some
form of organized  religion, usually Judeo-Christian.  

Now a reasoned criticism of religious views can certainly be given (on a
more  appropriate list, preferably); just as a reasoned defense can. 
Believers  such as Aquinas and Teilhard, Pascal and Descartes, Mendel and
Newton,  Polkinghorne and Tipler and even Mrs Moravec, are not quite the
gibbering  cretins some of us like to think.  But one-liners about
Christ's resurrection  rating a smirk are not reasoned criticism; they
just offend the sensibilities  of potential members, friends, and allies,
and they do it unnecessarily.  Is  this what we need to see on this list? 


Say you're an average person, a father or mother with a sick child that
looks  as though he won't make it; you believe in God and hope for an
afterlife, but  nonetheless you'd like to see your child grow up, marry,
have a career and  kids and a good long life; and somewhere you hear about
cryonics.  So you log  onto Cryonet, and what do you read?  That Mike
Darwin's dog rates good  medical treament, but not your dying child; that
you can pop your brain into  your PC fifty years from today but not now;
and your religion is a joke, and  you're a fool.  Yes, we'll certainly
save lots of lives with an approach like  that!  

Sometimes I think the only excuse for reading Cryonet is Robert Ettinger. 
But then that's reason enough.  If there is an argument for God, it's
that He  saw fit to give this crabby back-biting movement an originator of
sufficient  grace to keep bringing issues back down to earth.  Ettinger's
posts, really,  are the only ones on the list that consistently (or at any
rate, often)  address the real-world issues of cryonics - how an average
person can afford  it, how to actually get it done under tough if not
appalling conditions, why  one should hope rather than despair.  But this
father of the cryonics  movement must at times view his adolescent progeny
with real grief.  

David Pascal www.davidpascal.com  

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