X-Message-Number: 22507 Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 12:54:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Dan Hitt <> Subject: avoiding mortality, idealism, unacceptable impositions (22485) Hi Charles, Thanks for posting message 22485 to cryonet. You listed 9 factors tending to cause high turnover in cryonics personnel. Of these i'd like to quibble a little with, or maybe just question, #4 and #9. #4 states ``Cryonicists obviously are driven by a strong desire to avoid mortality''. Perhaps from context you were just talking about cryonics personnel? But in any event, my sense is that many posters here believe avoiding mortality is a strong driver in the whole community. But is this true? Personally, i don't believe my desire to avoid death is much stronger or weaker than anybody i'm in contact with. And perhaps it's just the nature of the written word which is my only means of knowing about them, but i don't get the impression that big contributors such as Saul Kent or Professor Ettinger are more motivated by avoiding death than anybody else. Is this really what motivates them? Is this what's motivating Mike D? Is this really what motivates most cryonicists? You of course have much more direct observational knowledge from which to make inferences, but it's hard for me to take as a given that personally avoiding death is the big motivator which distinguishes cryonicists from non-cryonicists. It seems rather to me that a more reasonable motivation is that we recognize and want to deal with a couple of real problems here: (A) that society throws away people at the first sign that we don't right at this very moment have a cheap, easy way of fixing them up, and (B) that most people don't even see (A) as a problem. I don't see this necessarily as idealism, except maybe in some weak, generalized sense. (This is your point #9, where you quote Harrington's line ``Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable''.) I think it's a matter of seeing that there's a bug here in society (point (A) above) and some people are naturally motivated to fix bugs. (Perhaps yet another reason why computer people get into cryonics?) A person's contribution can be as simple as writing a bug report (perhaps analogous to posting), to being a tester (analogous to signing up), or maybe writing some code (analogous to being an activist). We can all help a little. Does (e.g.) Perry Metzger have the same motivations for cryonics that he has for NetBSD? Somehow i'll bet he's just a problem solver. Thanks again for your post. dan Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22507