X-Message-Number: 30814
From: "Chris Manning" <>
Subject: 'Why People Believe Weird Things'
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:04:04 +1000


I recently purchased a copy of the book 'Why People Believe Weird Things' by the
well-known US skeptic Michael Shermer.
 
He devotes about a page to a discussion of cryonic suspension.
 
He writes in part:
 

'If cryonicists could succeed in reviving someone, the distinction between the 
living and the dead would blur. Life and death would become a continuum instead 
of the discrete states they have always been. Certainly, definitions of death 
would have to be rewritten.'
 

Of course the distinction is already blurred, since death is a process rather 
than an event. I guess I won't get any argument about that here.
 

Further on he discusses the fact that a person might be revived but without 
their memory or personal identity intact. He writes: 
 

'If cryonic revival does not result in return of considerable personal memory 
and identity, then what's the point?'
 

An interesting question. Would being restored to life with impaired memories, or
no memories, still be desirable? Would I want to be revived without some or all
of my memories? I think so but I'm not sure. I guess it would depend in part on
whether it will be possible to ascertain the state of my memories prior to my 
revival.
 

In 'The First Immortal' by James L. Halperin, terrorists break into the cryonic 
facility where the body of Alice Smith is stored and turn the temperature up. 
She is eventually revived from suspension but without her memories, so when she 
sees her son she doesn't recognise him. She is able to speak, because the 
scientists of that future era are able to implant a knowledge of language, and 
certain other things, into her brain artificially. After the situation is 
explained to her, she decides that in spite of having no memories of her former 
life, she is glad to have been revived. However, she regards herself as a 
different person, and mourns the death of her former self. ('The *real* Alice 
Smith, God rest her soul, was gone.')
 
Further on, Shermer writes:
 

'Ubiquitous in the cryonics literature are reminders that the history of science
and technology is replete with stories of misunderstood mavericks, surprise 
discoveries, and dogmatic closed-mindedness to revolutionary new ideas. The 
stories are all true, but cryonicists ignore all the revolutionary new ideas 
that were wrong.'
 

I think he is right about that, although I think we could argue that some new 
ideas are more inherently plausible than others. Cryonics, while not achievable 
today, does not violate any fundamental laws of science, whereas perpetual 
motion machines do.
 

Shermer goes on to discuss the theoretical possibility that cryonic suspension 
will become reversible due to nanotechnology. 'But theory and application are 
two different things, and a scientific conclusion cannot be based on what 
*might* be, no matter how logical it may seem or who endorses it. Until we have 
evidence, our judgment must remain, appropriately enough, suspended.'


Well I think my reply here would be that we make many decisions in life based on
taking a position where the standard of proof falls short of being 
'scientific'. Cryonics is not a science but a 'protoscience' based on plausible 
expectations about the future capabilities of science.

 Content-Type: text/html;

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30814