X-Message-Number: 24371 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: Physical Immortality, third quarter, 2004 Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 22:03:17 -0700 The third quarter, 2004 issue of "Physical Immortality" has come out, with a catchy, though rather abstract, cover illustration that alludes to the kinds of stylized "Humanist" symbols found on the Websites and literatures of the Council for Secular Humanism, the American Humanist Association and other allied Humanist societies around the world. No doubt Dr. Perry and others in the coalescing "Transhumanist" movement want to emphasize our philosophical continuities with the older Humanist tradition, as have pro-immortality and pro-human enhancement articles recently published in two major Humanist magazines.. As usual, Dr. Perry in his "First Words" column offers some publicly available news from the cryonics and Immortalist movements, including the unfortunate death and non-suspension of the pioneering gerontologist Roy Walford, followed by Perry's now-familiar historical and philosophical capitulation of the idea of man-made physical immortality. In Michael Hartl's article, "Oil Depletion and the Law of Diminishing Returns," based on a recent Cryonet post he made in response to my warnings about the oil situation, Hartl offers a debatable refutation of the claim, which now seems plausible to more and more analysts (including free-market ones), that we could be experiencing an energy crisis caused by the peak and decline of world oil extraction. Hartl thinks that solar energy would somehow become more "competitive" with oil if the price of oil rose to $100 a barrel from the current $40 range, without taking into account that rising oil prices would make all other forms of energy more expensive. We use energy from previously extracted oil to extract, transport and process "new" oil from the ground, in addition to using such oil to mine coal and uranium, drill for natural gas and build and maintain hydroelectric dams. The factories which manufacture solar-gathering technologies aren't themselves powered by the sun, but they are instead plugged into the regular power grid which depends on coal, natural gas and fissionable materials, the gathering of which from the earth's crust requires burning oil we have already pumped. As oil becomes more expensive, the other forms of energy we use it to acquire would tend to rise in price as well, including the technological means of capturing solar power. A true "alternative" energy system would have to cut out fossil fuels altogether and be able to reproduce itself from its own energy income in addition to supplying the energy we currently need. Our ancestors lived in a situation like that for a very long time -- Earth's preindustrial biosphere, before some enterprising Europeans and their American cousins figured out how to exploit coal and other fossil hydrocarbons to do the real work and greatly distort our sense of the "normal" state of the material culture (this artificial energy subsidy matters a lot more to the productive process than theories about the "productivity of human labor") -- but that system was not energetically sufficient for anything more than a peasant or hunter-gatherer existence for more than a few hundred million individuals. At best the sort of argument Hartl presents, based as it is on certain abstract economic assumptions and historical analogies, falls into the "not proven" category. The empirical energy news hasn't sounded good lately, as I have been documentin g at: http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=118&t=1975&hl=&s= In "Immortalist Utilitarianism," Michael Anissimov presents a mathematical-philosophical argument in favor of physical immortality which raises interesting questions about how people evaluate risks versus expected future utilities. In "The Beliefs of the Society for Universal Immortalism," Tripper McCarthy presents the assumptions of an Immortalist "religion" that could supplant traditional supernatural religions by defining the "soul" in a scientifically defensible way, based on Dr. Perry's argument in his magnum opus, "Forever For All." Speaking of which, Dr. Perry further explains his Big Idea in a discussion of how we could deal with imperfect preservations and resuscitations in his article, "Resurrection: Coping With Information Loss." Dr. Thomas Donaldson reviews yet another recent book that attempts to explain how the mechanism of neurology generates consciousness, along with making interesting comments of his own about this exciting new scientific frontier; and in his short story, "Traveling," Donaldson explores the perplexities of identity facing a long-dead human who was resuscitated from scraps of brain tissue and had to be given mostly what Dr. Perry calls "hyperontic" and "xenontic" memories because so much of his original information had been lost. The protagonist discovers that his highly edited and imaginatively reconstructed state is not that different from what he observes of the immortals who have survived over centuries and millennia with much greater informational integrity. In "Cryonic Advocates Respond to Legal Challenges," republished from the Website of the Immortality Institute (http://imminst.org/), many cryonicists and cryonics sympathizers present their arguments in favor of allowing individuals to choose cryotransport despite recent potentially hostile efforts to legislate it out of existence. It is encouraging that many of the supporters appear to be in their 20's. If you want to subscribe to "Physical Immortality," send US $24.00 to the Society for Venturism, 11255 S Highway 69, Mayer, AZ 86333, USA. Regards, Mark Plus _________________________________________________________________ Get fast, reliable Internet access with MSN 9 Dial-up now 2 months FREE! http://join.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200361ave/direct/01/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24371