X-Message-Number: 3621
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 22:07:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: CRYONICS:Funeral services, identity, AIDS patients


Mike Darwin has described his lack of success signing up AIDS patients.
All I can add is that of the approximately 500 essays contributed to the
Omni "immortality" contest, three were from AIDS patients. This shows that
at least a few AIDS patients are potentially interested, but overall I
agree with Mike that it is not a constituency which we should pursue. I
don't see any way to avoid the "vulture" image, I don't see how to avoid
angering and alienating people, and since many AIDS patients are now
making use of services which offer cash in exchange for pre-existing life
insurance policies, I would imagine that very, very few terminal AIDS
cases will be able to afford cryonics anyway, unless they signed up for
cryonics before they got AIDS, in which case they are outside the scope of
this discussion. 

Mike also writes about the "cost" of cryonics. I hope no one misunderstood
him to mean "cost" in financial terms. For those of us who feel that
cryonics is maddeningly close to offering real hope, without being able to
*guarantee* predictable, measurable performance, belonging to a cryonics
organization, and being a cryonics activist, is a tantalizing, frustrating
experience, raising endless agonizing issues (e.g. to what extent is it
ethical to give other people hope in cryonics, when we don't know how to
measure our own? And--how much of my time should I spend trying to improve
the chances of cryonics working, instead of just enjoying myself and
spending my money on life today?)

On the other hand, Mike seems to forget that some cryonicists--perhaps the
majority--believe that cryonics in its present-day form is almost certain
to work for them. In these cases, I don't believe there is the kind of
downside which troubles Mike, and cryonics provides a great deal of
reassurance with very few "side effects." 

--------

Gregory Bloom writes:

> Really, after figuring in the cost of a somewhat ostentatious funeral
> and casket, the cost of cryo is not entirely out of the ballpark as
> a mortuarial service.  True, selling cryonics from funeral parlors
> completely subverts the whole philosophy behind cryonics, but it
> does offer the promise of an inroad into mass acceptance. 

Curtis Henderson (whose association with cryonics goes back about 30
years) once suggested that a dewar with a window in it would offer an
incentive for people who want to see their relatives "perfectly"
preserved. (It would reduce insulation efficiency and increase liquid
nitrogen boiloff, of course, but we're assuming a rich clientele here.)

The only trouble is, many relatives are horrified by the idea of someone
ever "coming back," and for this reason see cryonics as sacrilegious. To
follow your plan, Gregory, we would have to pretend that cryonics=burial,
while secretly planning to revive the patient. I don't think this is
practical. 

Also, I suspect that relatives would not be sanguine about the fact that 
ongoing preservation of the loved one entails an unending supply of 
liquid nitrogen. Most people want to believe that burial=permanence.

--------

Robert Ettinger and others have written about identity and consciousness. 
If anyone can tell me what these words really mean, then I would enjoy 
participating in the discussion. Right now, the debate reminds me of 
people in a dark room, arguing about the color red. No one can actually 
see it, so no one can ultimately agree on what it looks like, although 
there some ingenious theories about how to prove that it exists.

Mr. Ettinger tries to get around the subjectivity problem, as follows:

> Can there be objective criteria for subjective conditions? Certainly. You
> don't have to be a cow to say "cheese." When we know the physiological basis
> of feeling in humans (and other mammals), we will know how to spot it. 

But by this definition, ONLY a mammalian system, or a precise structural 
imitation, can be intelligent. If I have a machine which I believe is 
intelligent, and it doesn't imitate the physiological processes which Mr. 
Ettinger has chosen as his test for intelligence, then my machine is 
automatically disqualified by Mr. Ettinger's definition. This is a neat 
way for him to "prove" that machines can't be intelligent, but it doesn't 
seem entirely fair.

Personally I believe that anyone or anything that reasons logically could
rightly claim to be intelligent and conscious. The idea that these
qualities are uniquely "human" seems anthropocentric to me and smells a
bit like the historically recent notion (which no primitive people would
subscribe to) that animals don't have souls. I can't help feeling that
this kind of outlook may derive from a desire among human beings generally
to feel "special." 

Mr. Ettinger seems to want to draw a line between people and machines (at 
least as they exist today), and rejects the Turing Test:

> Even some presently existing programs can fool some people some of the time.
>  In any duel between a clever programmer (or even a very stupid but massive
> and very fast computer) and a maybe-not-so-clever auditor, the programmer
> might win. Therefore passing the Turing Test is not a sufficient condition.

But if the test is prolonged--for days, weeks, or years--and a person
still ends up "fooled" into thinking that the computer is intelligent, I
maintain that by any practical definition, the computer would *be*
intelligent. And if the computer claimed that it had an immortal soul,
there would be no way to disprove that, either. 
 
> An impaired human might fail the Turing test; therefore this test is not a
> necessary condition.

An impaired human would not be as intelligent as an unimpaired human; 
therefore, I feel this argument proves nothing. Incidentally, I recently
attended a *real life* Turing test (which I am writing about for Wired
magazine), and during the relatively brief Q&A session (three hours total)
three judges came to the conclusion that one of the human confederates
online was really a computer program--even though the confederate was
trying as hard as possible to seem "human." This just emphasizes to me
that "intelligence" may not be as unique and special as we like to think 
it is. The line between computers and people is already beginning to look 
just a fraction blurred, even though AI is at a very primitive level.

Overall, I assume that no one is going to reject cryonics for the sole 
reason that a revived person might not have the same "identity" as 
before. Therefore, the "identity" issue is not critical when it comes to 
promoting cryonics, and therefore I don't see this discussion as being 
directly relevant to the work that needs to be done, in public relations 
or on the technical side.

############################################################
Charles Platt, 1133 Broadway (room 1214), New York, NY 10010
      Voice: 212 929 3983      Fax: 212 929 4467


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