X-Message-Number: 1584
Date: 11 Jan 93 11:15:23 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS: She Walks the Bloody Halls...
Charles Platt writes about neurosuspension:
>>But let me go further into this question of neurosus-
pensions. In my experience doing radio interviews, talk-show
hosts and telephone callers are less willing to accept "going
neuro" than any other cryonics concept. Severing a human head is
such a primal image, echoing back to primitive tribal
practices and medieval punishments.<<
My comment: Charles, that's not the half of it; I think it may
go WAY deeper than that. In chimpanzee experiments we have found
that chimps not only have an instinctive (i.e., hardwired-in)
fear of snakes and heights, but also a fear of disembodied chimp
parts, like arms and heads. It's not hard to see how evolution
might have caused such a response in primates, since predators
and decay often leave the tougher and/or less appetizing parts
like hands and heads relatively intact after a kill; so if you're
a chimp and you see chimp parts, you want to go somewhere else.
It's also not hard to imagine (though not proven) that we human
primates, who share 98.4% of our DNA pattern with chimps and are
also known to share an innate fear of snakes and heights with
them, might also have some crawly feelings about disembodied body
parts which don't entirely come from our rational and cultural
programming. If so, this response may be unusually hard to root
out and deal with when it becomes counterproductive to survival
(eg., cryonics).
There has been, particularly in this century, an argument from
one quarter that humans are born _tabula rasa_, and have no
instinctive behaviors at all. You can perhaps see some of this
kind of idea working in entomologists and herpetologists when
they complain peevishly that people kill snakes and spiders (most
of which are harmless and hardworking and beneficial creatures),
instead of appreciating them for the marvelous life-forms that
they are. Here, here, they say, it's only social prejudice.
Gosh, if people would just understand cognitively that a taran-
tula is far less likely to bite you to death than a St. Bernard,
they'd be just as ready to pet one. Yep.
To pick a more politically incorrect example (now I'm in for
it), you also see this kind of idea in certain feminists, who
complain bitterly that certain gauche human males become sexually
excited by looking at the female human's breast, as though it were
merely a "sex object," like a peacock's tail. Those awful men;
how dare they? Why these feminists think that evolution gave
human females breasts as large as they have (on average), when
much smaller and less fatty ones would (perfectly provably)
produce milk just as well, is not clear to this writer. Perhaps
the key word in the last sentence is "think."
In any case, of course deep evolutionary human responses
related to territoriality, sexuality, and fear-responsiveness CAN
be overlaid and de-emphasized by education and desensitization,
but it's a difficult process. The skydiver wearing a parachute
does not have nearly the same emotional response to a great
heights that the rest of us do. Still, fear is not suppressed
even in the sport-parachutist, and most of these will admit
rather freely that the residual of fear is part of the thrill
("If you're not scared, you're not having fun," said my skydiving
instructor, just before we jumped). Also, we observe that,
desensitization or no, deeper and more primal emotional responses
can always return, despite the longest training, in different
social contexts. My favorite story along this line is from a
physician who tells the tale of being in a roomful of gyne-
cologists at a medical convention, back in the days when most
gynecologists were men, and observing (during one lecture) that
the whole audience of physicians became distracted from the
speaker at one point when a pretty girl in a miniskirt came in
and bent to adjust the projector. This provoked much nervous
laughter eventually as the doctors realized not only what they
were doing, but also the complete irony of what they were doing.
So-- back directly to our subject: is there any way to
completely defuse emotionally the neuropreservation issue? I
suspect not. This is very deep psychology here. As good old
H.P. Lovecraft knew (as I said in my last essay), fear of
disembodied brains or heads is as basic as the fear of alienation
which plagues people when they think of waking up in a place
where nobody knows them. Either fear can be worse than the
simple fear of dying. Lovecraft had all sorts of people both
losing their bodies and winding up lost to society, but alive.
It's great for horror! Think of the pieced-together Franken-
stein's monster and his alienated plight. We primates are
social, and we don't LIKE detached body parts or the idea of
someone made from them.
To wind up, let me illustrate the psychological power of these
themes with another literary example, from a century before
Lovecraft's work. Washington Irving is probably the first major
American writer (stories circa 1820), and today there is hardly a
person in America who does not now know some of his tales. This
is a rather remarkable feat: how would YOU, as a short story
writer, like to have managed to have nearly every single person
in your culture know some of your work, 170 years after you
wrote? Nifty, eh? That's an honor given to very few story-
tellers, and is quite a feat (sort of like the one given to Mary
Shelley, who was writing Frankenstein about the same time...).
But hold on-- Irving wrote many, many tales, and only TWO are
known popularly now; all the rest have been forgotten except to
very tiny set of scholars. So what were the two stories, and
what was special about them? Could it be that they both tapped a
very deep emotional resonance; something primal and fearful?
Let's see. One story is "Rip Van Winkle," and it is about a one-
way time-traveler-- a man who undergoes a long sleep, finally to
wake to find himself displaced to a future time where people do
not know him, and he is an alien to what was his own society.
Hmmmm. The second tale is "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." You
get the idea.
Steve Harris
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