X-Message-Number: 15142 Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 07:09:42 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: comments on 2 issues Hi everyone! If you've wondered where I went, the answer is simple. I was producing PERIASTRON, the 1 November issue (it's now been mailed out to those subscribing and a few others, and ACS will no doubt soon have some of it on their web site). I felt, after reading the various messages, that two issues (related) deserved my comments. The first of these is the sequence of messages by Dani Kollin and others commenting on what he said: There is NO need at all to introduce religion into cryonics. Why? Because cryonics does not involve any dealings at all with truly dead people, only with people whom many (due to ignorance) think to be dead. Think about that. You don't become truly dead merely because a doctor writes out your death certificate. We've already seen, at least some of us, the effect of means to restart stopped hearts has had. More recently, though it hasn't shown up so loudly, those involved in resuscitation now know how to bring someone back after about 2 X the delay it used to take. If you are really really dead, then no amount of cryonics advances will ever bring you back. We freeze (or hopefully turn to glass) people whom we think can someday be brought back, not because they are really dead but just the reverse: we think that the BELIEF that they are dead is straight out FALSE. All the religious issues which some people raise about cryonics comes from the belief that the guy who wrote the death certificate knew what he (or she) was doing. If you understand that he/she DIDN'T know, that death certificate becomes a piece of scrawled and meaningless paper. So much for religion and cryonics. A second issue also arose on Cryonet recently. This one is more subtle, but just as insidious in its own way. Very simple: no, it does not follow that because we are finite, thn we are only going to be subject to a finite (though perhaps very large) number of fatal illnesses. Just as a mirror is finite but can show an almost infinite variety of scenes, it's not enough to say that WE are finite. We respond to the world, and the world is far larger (if you insist, I can give you figures) than we are... and I mean here not just the Earth but the entire Universe, and whatever else we may someday learn about. Yes, given that we do NOT grow or even change, WE may be finite. But the universe in which we're living is far larger, and can cause us to come down with very many new conditions not thought of before. Sure, if we assume we are not only finite but unchanging, those conditions may (some of them) resemble one another superficially, but since they come from outside us, just how to treat them may differ a good deal. Moreover, we DO grow and change, which means that it's not even clear that an assumption that we are finite AT ANY GIVEN TIME will say very much about disease conditions we'll get OVER time. We can be finite at any time but infinite over time. And why is this important? Because it says that we'll still want to use some form of cryonics into the indefinite future. Sure, the exact form may differ, and ultimately involved (perhaps) use of means to read us off into some storage device, but the basic idea of preserving someone if we can't fix them will continue indefinitely ... and there will ALWAYS be conditions we cannot fix at some particular time. Sure, some time later we'll know what to do, but that time may take years to arrive. And moreover, the number of people who need such treatment may easily keep on going down by some factor < 1, but that does not mean it will ever reach ZERO. We cannot really get immortality without also using cryonics. So those are my comments on two recent issues in Cryonet. Best wishes and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15142