X-Message-Number: 2581 Subject: Canadian CRYONICS Dinner From: (Ben Best) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 02:00:00 -0500 Twelve people -- all male -- attended the Canadian Cryonics Dinner at Aida's Falafel Restaurant in Toronto on January 30th. This was primarily an outreach event -- the only signed-up cryonicist in attendance was me (Ben Best). Four people brought friends who had no previous direct exposure to a cryonicist, and most were given literature. One of these friends seemed serious about signing-up and wanted information on costs and procedures. He also wanted to know the Vatican's views on the subject because he is Roman Catholic. (Does anyone know if the Vatican has ever made a statement about cryonics?) A focus of much conversation was a University of Toronto student named Jeff who is entering graduate school in neurophysiology for the specific purpose of discovering ways to preserve the mind. Jeff seemed interested in any means -- freezing or chemical preservation -- of preserving the brain until it is possible to scan the relevant information into a computer. The point in dispute was whether it would be possible to determine if the computer had really adopted his identity -- or had simply acquired the capacity of simulating his responses -- a "Jeff imitation machine". A fellow named James is a comic-book author -- and he brought one of his artists. Both seem genuinely interested in cryonics, but are not inclined to sign-up yet. James is plotting a comic book story based on the idea of a woman who has been frozen and brought into the future. She is reanimated by a reconstruction based on her frozen remains, but then the remains become public-domain software that anyone can use to make duplicates for their own purposes. -- Ben Best (ben.best%) Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2581