X-Message-Number: 24184
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 08:01:16 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #24179 - #24183

Hi everyone!

A few comments on the Wednesday 2 June Cryonet:

For David Stodolsky:
I do not intend to defend "idea futures" --- among other problems, I 
would need a better idea of what they might be. However I will say that
markets can (but hardly do) apply to everything. If two people, or a
whole group of people, wish to bet on whether or not robots will equal
the intelligence and mental abilities of humans by (say) 2050, they're
free to do so. Some will make money on their bet, others will lose.
Whatever means we might use to analyze the likelihood of such a bet
are precisely those someone making such bets would use to do so. They
aren't necessarily separate forms of activity. Naturally the person
who has better ideas of how ideas will develop will win more such 
bets --- but then an understanding of probability helps ordinary 
betting too. And for games such as poker, played against human 
opponents, more than just probability is involved.

For "Basie": 
For immortalists, there is a fundamental problem in transplantation
of brains. This has never been done as a treatment for aging, even
in rats or mice; however parts of brains have been transplanted.
And guess what: transplanting a brain part from an older rat to 
a younger rat caused the recipient rat to age very rapidly until
it became older. The problem is that in transplanting brains, you
do not deal with aging of the brain itself, and changes in the 
hormonal output to the rest of the body which come from our lower
brains (and those of rats, too).

              Best wishes and long long life for all,

                  Thomas Donaldson

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24184