X-Message-Number: 19800 Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 10:41:09 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: to Steve Harris To Steve Harris: Hi Steve. And please remember: 1. I respect your intelligence and 2. I continue to disagree with you about assessing the "probability of success of cryonics". I added more to my first message on this issue later in Cryonet, so some of this is repetition. In any case, there are TWO kinds of probability assessment. In one, which is that which we use for assessing the weather, working out who may be elected, etc etc, we actually have a substantial number of previous cases on which to work. Lots of weather, lots of elections, lots of card games, etc. It's reasonable in such cases to use probability: after all, we can do the simple thing of (say) counting up the number of thunderstorms that happen per year in the city in which we live over a period of at least 100 years, and then use that to calculate the probability that a thunderstorm will happen tomorrow. (With the weather we can do even more than that, but I won't get into that issue because it's irrelevant to what I'm saying). The other kind of probability assessment tries to work out the probability of an event which has never happened before. I mean this literally: we can work out the probability, say, of a large asteroid hitting the earth because such bombardments HAVE happened in the past, though hardly the recent past. As for revival or ourselves, or ANY cryonics patient, we have no previous or even similar case on which to base our calculations. None. Zilch. Any assumptions (and they ARE assumptions) we make about the probability of events required for the event whose probability we want to find out can fail so easily that they mean nothing at all. Most important, we don't even have the information required to know just what we don't know: how does our memory work? Just how it works can radically affect the time taken to repair us, and at least in that way make any estimate of revival meaningless. We DO know that our memory does not require constant electrical activity to survive, but compared with cryonic suspension that's hardly very strong. For that matter, our probability of remaining in suspension is affected by many factors, not one of which we can really work out well enough to make probability other than dreaming. Would the revival of someone cause lots of people to join, or cause religious revivals against the irreligious idea of keeping alive for longer than God's given span? Don't ask me, I can't claim to know. You can play Drake on this question as much as you want, but your assumptions for your Drake equation can't be established even as well as those for the original Drake equation ... which as we've seen, was hardly very well. It's not that I think that thinking about the prospects of cryonics are useless. I think instead that anything I or others can do to better those prospects is very worth doing. Nor do I think that the success of cryonics can be worked out by Draking probabilities. The best thing to do is to work on the problem, one way or another. If (as seems likely) vitrific- ation becomes fully successful, we've changed the probabilitty of success a good deal. And just how society reacts to cryonics depends not on some roll of dice but also on how we ourselves behave. We are not just rolling dice or drawing cards here, what we do can affect the outcome. Even the likelihood of reviving EARLY patients depends on the work we do now, on getting a more precise idea of the damage, and on how memory works, and so just how that damage may have altered or erased their memories. Yes, and someday we may well find intelligent races among the stars. Their history will trace back to a small planet called Earth, after thousands or millions of years of separate evolution. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19800