X-Message-Number: 2273
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: cryonics: #2267-#2272
Date: Fri, 21 May 93 21:08:28 PDT



I apparently have found two people who object to what I said.

Or,  at least, what they think I said.

First, the problem is that a suspension patient is NOT a correctly assembled
group of molecules. Moreover, nerve cells and their connections extend over
distances no one would call "nano". Before any entity puts together a muddled,
broken human being, they need some idea of what a correctly assembled human
being would be like. That is a question of biology.

Furthermore, without an understanding of our memory and how it works, not only
does this repair entity not know how to repair the damaged person, but it
cannot even state with assurance that the memory can definitely be restored.
I am among those cryonicists who believe that there still exists some question
about whether or not our memories have been destroyed --- not necessarily by
suspension, but by the events preceding it. I AM a cryonicist because I'm
taking a well-considered bet that it is not. But I would not claim to know
this.

Clearly, IF we have the position of every molecule in the body of a HEALTHY
(or at living and not moribund!) person, we could restore that person merely
by placing the molecules in their proper positions. But reviving someone from
suspension just isn't that problem: we do not have the original plan of the 
patient. Instead we have a damaged version. So what is it about the position
of these molecules that makes this damaged version into an undamaged one?

On the scale of molecules, there are millions of possible solutions, but an
even larger (enough to make the millions of possible solutions into a 
comparatively small number) numbers of false solutions: either because they
still remain damaged, or because they bring the damaged person back as a
completely undamaged --- elephant, say.

I know that there are people (I am not one) who say that the damage is 
comparatively slight. First, when I look at those few micrographs we have
of frozen animal brains, I don't see amounts of damage I would call "slight"
at all. Remember that our nerve cells, with glial cells and blood vessels,
pack closely into our skull; remember that (by all best current accounts)
it is the connections of nerve cells to one another that produce memory. But
many of those connections are severed, with other such connections nearby.
So which fits together with which? And notice also that anyone looking at
a micrograph is NOT looking at molecules, but at structures much larger,
which change during the (healthy) life of the person. To make such judge-
ments at all, they need more than simply a list of molecular positions.

One point of what I was saying, of course, was that even though at every
instant we are some instance of an arrangement of molecules, we are not

ourselves simply an arrangement of molecules. We are a SET of such 
arrangements.Do you really feel that you have become a different person if one 
of the
enzymes in your heart cell moves forward a small bit under normal temperature
movements? If you do, then you must accept that you are changing constantly,
that we can never really have a conversation because each of becomes a 
different person by the time it comes round to reply. Nor is this idea
especially mystical, or nonmaterialist. We know many things, some of them
not living, which change constantly. The problem a repair entity must address,
given that it has only damaged version in front of it, is to restore that
version to one instance of the SET of molecular arrangements that was the
healthy person. How can it do this without an understanding of how we
work on a level higher than molecular?

No doubt this argument will continue, of course. 
			Best and long life,
				Thomas

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