X-Message-Number: 16567
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 12:03:57 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #16553 - #16561

>Message #16553
>Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 11:14:24 +0000 ()
>From: Louis Epstein <>
>...
>We are hoping to be immortal,
>but to me part of immortality
>is a degree of immutability.

Agreed.

>If you can't avoid changing your
>basic nature your survival is no
>longer genuine.

Again, I agree except that one has to decide what is really "basic" to 
one's nature. I expect many changes as the future unfolds, including 
substantial changes in myself, but I hope, of the nature of enhancements, 
not destructive or "rewriting" changes. In this way I hope to survive in a 
reasonable sense, while also progressing.

>(Hence,"uploads"
>can no more be humans than we
>are the tree rats of 75 million
>years ago that we are descended
>from).

I hope to become more than human. Being human is a stage of my existence, 
that's all, rather like being a small child, which I still remember with 
fondness, but do not want to repeat. In particular I do not have the same 
body now as then. In the future I will, no doubt, be expressed in a still 
different physical medium. The physical medium to me is not so important as 
what is happening at the informational level, which includes remembering.

>...
> > I think that DLG has good intentions, but
> > identifying as a "deathist" (we don't know your real name) is tough on us
> > who value the opposite of deathism so highly.
>
>Actually,I located her real name
>and replied to her by it,and she
>admitted to it in her response.
>You didn't notice that exchange?

Yes, "Debra" was a name she apparently used (was that her real name? what 
about last name?) on another forum but she didn't tell us about it (and 
didn't seem to appreciate your efforts to dredge it up either).

>I suppose the allure of mortalism
>is that it's "normal",and accepting
>it is held up as a sign of maturity.

How do we best try to change that attitude?

>...
>
>Message #16558
>Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 17:40:23 -0500
>From: david pizer <>
>Subject: We want your ideas!
>
>Constructing an argument for support of cryonic suspension.
>Your ideas are appreciated.
>By David Pizer
>
>The Venturists hope to have the resort part (open to the general public) of
>VentureVille completed one year from now and the larger dwellings (more
>like condos or single family homes for immortalists only) completed in
>about two years from now.

Dave deserves congratulations for his efforts--nice work, and let's hope it 
can be carried to completion!

>  We are not able to give more details than this
>at this time.  However, with these completion dates in mind and since this
>is not so far in the future any more, we are now ready to start working on
>our primary argument for cryonics.

This has been a tough nut to crack so far, and I expect it will stay that 
way, but we have to try our best. It's not enough just to say cryonics is a 
possible way to defeat death.

>It seems that some of the basic premises of this new and powerful argument
>must address:
>1.      Why life is valuable to live;
>2.      Why biological immortality is apt to come along soon;
>3.      Why cryonics might provide a vehicle to that future time.
>4.      Why the future will be a great place to be.
>
>Each premise is very complicated and it can be a small argument on the way
>to combining all four.

And, I'll ask, will all four of these be enough? People seem to have a 
built-in psychological mechanism that inclines them toward mystical, 
irrational thinking when it comes to dealing with death. To me it seems 
essential, if we are ever to change that thinking in advance of 
technological miracles, to promote two other ideas. These, however, are 
highly controversial within the immortalist community itself and not 
generally accepted.

One is that, over a broad spectrum of choices, better preservation of 
remains after death is more advantageous than worse preservation, where by 
"more advantageous" I mean "better for you as an individual in the future 
life you will experience." The second, related to this, is that death is 
not an absolute and even the unfrozen dead will experience an eventual 
awakening, through means that can be rationally contemplated. Making these 
two points as solidly as I could was a major part of writing my book and 
has a lot to do with its being more than 500 pages long. But again these 
are controversial positions not generally accepted by immortalists. They 
depend on such things as identifying persons as informational entities 
whose "identity" depends on the underlying pattern, not a specific material 
construct. To me that seems a sound and defensible position, even if at 
first sight it is counterintuitive. In particular it can be justified 
mathematically, since isomorphic structures can often be treated as identical.

The public at large is concerned about issues such as whether their already 
deceased loved ones are gone forever, and whether cryonics is worth 
pursuing now, if you can't offer a near guarantee of success. ("Success" 
and "failure," of course, are treated as entirely dichotomous and mutually 
exclusive.) What do you tell them? I hope to be able to offer my philosophy 
as at least "one possiblity to consider" even though it will probably be 
overshadowed by others. These in turn I find less appealing, and I think 
the general public is turned off to them too, maybe more than I am. People 
are, in effect, being asked to accept that life has a major unrightable 
wrong (the dead cannot be raised), no matter what sort of future may be 
possible for them. This future in turn depends on some weird (to them), 
science-fictional concepts coming true, which they will say is not only 
very far from guaranteed, but even then could not bring the highest 
happiness, but in some ways only an empty mockery of what they had 
previously hoped. Is it such a wonder, then, that there are so many 
supernaturalists but so few cryonicists?


On the Visser fraud, I, like a number of others, was taken in by these 
charming and seemingly sincere people (Olga and her husband Sigi) who 
visited Alcor and demonstrated their techniques to those of us here. I 
wondered about some of the details, such as why "successful" resuscitations 
seemed to happen only under brief immersion of the organ in LN2. Not being 
expert in these matters, I deferred to the judgment of others. We in 
cryonics owe a debt of gratitude to the few like Mike Darwin who focused 
enough on these details to expose the claims for the falsehoods they were.

Mike Perry

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