X-Message-Number: 30913 From: Mark Plus <> Subject: A review of Mike Darwin's UK lecture, part 2 Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 21:54:18 -0700 ["Kashmir" on ImmInst continues:] He explained that he had become convinced that the only way cryonics and, for that matter, Transhumanism, could succeed was by a relentless insurgency, and that notions that cryonics was just an extension of medicine and was compatible with religion and existing social and political institutions, while superficially satisfying, were both mistaken and bound to fail. (When we spoke afterwards he arched an eyebrow as he said, "These approaches are useful as tools or pabulum. They delay understanding by the culture that we represent its destruction, indeed that we represent the destruction of the human species and its replacement with us, which is unquestionably the most horrible thing imaginable; if they could imagine it, which thankfully, they can't. Not yet, anyway!") He pointed out that the lead-off to the insurgencies of new ideas is dangerous and sometimes deadly and he accompanied these remarks with illustrations of the burning of Giordano Bruno, the trial of Galileo, and a grainy picture of Darwin himself, made from what appeared to be a press clipping, being lead away in handcuffs on charges of murdering a cryonics patient. The image of Bruno was particularly haunting for me since it brought forth the vision of him being hauled naked into the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, in 1600, his jaw clamped shut with an 'iron bridle,' an iron spike having already been driven through his tongue. He was then lashed to a stake and burned alive. It's hard to imagine more dire consequences from disturbing the culture than those. From this intense discourse he moved on to discuss the origin of the idea of cryonics and to characterize the two men responsible for its creation and dissemination, Evan Cooper and Robert Ettinger. He described both men as very similar in temperament and personality type. Both were intellectuals and introverts, neither was of a practical nature with expertise in finance, enterprise or engineering. Whilst at pains to point out that he attached no blame to either man for their character, he noted that it nevertheless resulted in an inceptive approach that lacked the detailed preparative work and planning that must necessarily accompany the successful launch of any new idea, let alone a paradigm challenging one like cryonics. In our subsequent conversation he noted that both Darwin (the other one) and Marx were aware of the incendiary nature of their theses and that both took decades to research and refine their arguments with meticulous scholarship before exposing them to public criticism. He also made the point that cryonics uniquely differed from Communism or Natural Selection in that it proposed, and in fact required, practical implementation in the world in 1964. This meant that in addition to its ideological component, it required the immediate creation of a variety of goods and services, such as human-sized cryostats, rescue and recovery teams, perfusion procedures and equipment and so on. His explication of the "medical, biomedical and cultural context of 1964," the year Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality was published, left me shaking my head in awe of the early cryonics pioneers. At that time, as Darwin notes: . Discovery of DNA structure was only 11-years old. . CPR was only 4-years old. Leonard Cobb would not hold the first citizen CPR training sessions in Seattle, WA in until 19723 (8-years later). . Uniform Determination of Death Act not passed until 1978 (14-years later). . First Heart transplant was 3-years in the future (1967). . Most of the United States had no emergency medical system (EMS), and ambulances were hearses driven by Funeral Directors. The "White Paper" (Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society) which lead to the creation of the EMS was not published until 1966. In his lecture he said that no one would have a chance of success if they ventured to launch an enterprise of any scale without a business plan, and he noted that cryonics started without any significant or detailed forethought on practical matters. He divides the history of cryonics into four eras, each with their achievements, and with each ending in ultimate failure to put the idea over. He posits the first era as from 1964 to 1972 and characterizes it as doomed by incompatibility with the existing "medical, biomedical and cultural context" of the time, as well as due to a list of what he terms "initialization failures" Again, from his slides: . No entrepreneurship; abdication of responsibility for implementation of cryonics to others. . No first approximation of technological specifications. No business planning. . Active endorsement of con men, frauds and the incompetent. . Failure to define death with scientific rigor and to establish "cryonic suspension" as a "fourth state" as distinguished from life, death, and true suspended animation (i.e., a condition with an uncertain prognosis and an uncertain time course to resolution). . Use of the words death and dead to describe cryopatients. . Identification and alliance with the mortuary and cemetery trades, as opposed to the medical and scientific professions. . Failure to develop any in-house standards of care, either technical or financial. Failure to professionalize cryonics. It wasn't clear to me how you could have a business plan for something like cryonics in 1964 until he showed how it should have been done, and how it ultimately was done, about a decade later. He presented a box-diagram chart showing what he termed the "critical functional elements" that were required for a cryonics program in 1964. This included both institutional elements such as brochures, educational seminars, legal counselling, management, financial arrangements, cost estimating and the like; as well as technical elements such as an emergency notification system, a perfusion and storage facility and equipment required to provide liquid nitrogen storage. He then chose one of these "critical elements," the emergency notification system, and performed a "subsystem" analysis defining all the necessary ingredients as understood in 1964 from which ran the gamut from a costly item such as a CPR machine called the" Iron Heart," to cotton balls and a bottle of alcohol! He argued that these things needed to be enumerated and cost-determined as part of a comprehensive blueprint for implementing the cryonics program. He noted that this was best practice at the time in most large enterprises, and had reached a highly developed state and was mandated as best practice in the aerospace industry. In fact, he made the point with his next slide that it was not until an aerospace engineer, Fred Chamberlain, and a businessman, Art Quaife, came into leadership positions within cryonics that these critical elements were more or less put into place around 1975. Fascinating pictures from this period were shown documenting the development of the first procedures and accompanying instruction manuals for recovery and perfusion, as well the design and construction of the first hardware for performing suspensions, including construction of a mobile perfusion theatre in the mid-1970s! I had no idea any of this had happened, let alone that there were photographs of it! He noted that these initialization failures resulted in a "cascade of follow-on problems such as lack of adequate capitalization, no access to high quality profession and technical services such as physicians, cryobiologists, businessmen, cryogenic equipment manufacturers, intense hostility from the scientific community at large, lastly, the Chatsworth calamity." The next problem he identified, and one which he said has grown over time until it has almost overwhelmed cryonics today, is what he referred to as "temporal load shifting" or the problem of "our friends in the future. " Darwin describes "our friends in the future" as an utterly corrosive idea that is nevertheless intrinsic to the success of cryonics" (we can't revive ourselves!). As the text to the slides in this part of the talk note: "Our friends in the future have unknown limitations and it is all too easy to believe they will have none. Even more conveniently, those "friends" are not yet born, so they cannot possibly object. Shifting our technological and financial shortcomings today onto a potentially "near omnipotent" future technology is easy, seemingly creditable, and removes the burden for urgent (or any) action to improve things now." He described how this notion caused cryonicists to increasingly shift the burdens, technological and financial, present and future, onto the people who we believe will revive us from suspension. In our later conversation, he referred to this as "Trans-Temporal Communism:" from cryonicists now according our ability (none); and from our "friends in the future" according to our needs (infinite). "He said this was politically incorrect and so he could not use it in his presentation. His next slide pictured Robbie the Robot from the classic SciFi film "Forbidden Planet" along with this text: How accurate is our vision of the future? How much hubris can we afford to have as seers, when our very lives depend upon the outcome? How many of your friends today are willing to pay for all your medical expenses, as well as set you up in a new life whilst feeding, clothing and housing you while you are re-educated, retrained and put back on your feet? What moral and cultural code will make tomorrow's people, or Transhumans, different from Bill Gates, or even the Dali Lama, and how they treat their friends in need today?" And he noted that Robbie the Robot was once his vision of what the future would be like. Darwin argues that an even more damaging extension of this idea is the concept that "the Singularity is at hand, and therefore any expenditure of effort on cryonics makes little sense to the young and hopeful. Omega point technology will allow resurrection of everyone - even the long dead - so why bother?" He then asked us "Who of you here today hold this position? Will one of you please come to the front of the room?" Whereupon with a bit prodding a reluctant volunteer stepped forward and Darwin proposed to put out his eye with a ballpoint pen, saying that it should make little difference to the chap since the Singularity is at hand, and certainly long before then it will be possible to replace a missing eye! And besides, it was only one eye and the memory of the pain would be nothing to an immortal Transhuman. It is hard to describe this moment. Darwin is a peculiar combination of the wild-man American televangelist, Richard Fenyman giving his famous lectures, and Churchill lashing out against the Germans during the Blitz. He made his point that sitting on your arse and waiting for the Singularity, or relying on your friends in the future was "grotesquely immoral and inhuman since it meant subjecting ourselves and everyone around us to the unspeakable horrors of aging, death and disease, as well as to the terror that accompanies them." He said that no matter what happens in the future, this suffering is real and has meaning, and that just as no sane person would allow his eye to be poked out today because of his certainty about future technological advances, similarly no sane, and as he further emphasized, "certainly no moral person would allow the suffering and the death of billions when it could be avoided by action now." _________________________________________________________________ Get more from your digital life. Find out how. http://www.windowslive.com/default.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Home2_082008 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30913