X-Message-Number: 3838
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 09:14:43 -0500 (EST)
From: Andro <>
Subject: Memory & Identity SCI.CRYONICS


I've just read Ettinger's "Prospect of Immortality" (kind of slow, aren't I?)
and I am delighted that a book that must inevitably take its place with 
the literary milestones in human history, should contain enough sense of 
play to (for example) measure the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.

At first reading, only two things date the book for me: the dismissal of 
natural pregnancy and breast-feeding (something that many people may look 
forward to experiencing in the distant future, when they have enough 
leisure), and the optimistic belief that the logic of cryonics would receive 
mass acceptance within a couple of years.

The near-universal rejection of cryonics - the fear, manifested as 
ridicule or disgust, that it engenders - implies that we are dealing with 
something absolutely key to the makeup of the human being.  This factor 
must be somewhere in the identity and in the memory.

Science already recognizes two kinds of memory in the human: short-term 
and long-term.  But who has looked for these kinds? -
	A gene to allow the transmission not just of brain structure, but 
of information-patterns held in parts of the brain; so that key areas of 
human activity would have the evolutionary advantage of specific fears 
built up in them over time, as the justification for those fears was repeated
(falling from heights, animals snarling, spiders, snakes, things that 
leap at you, etc).
	A particular area of pre-existing brain information that is copied 
from the mother to the child at a set time during fetal development, and can 
involve psychological as well as physical information.
	A time in the development of the fetus when an event for the 
mother, especially one involving strong emotions (attack by a dog, for 
example, or overwhelming love) would be structured into the memory of the 
fetus as well.

If the latter two exist, they have relevance for ex-utero fetal development.

They also have implications for understanding the fear of death, and the 
nature of denial mechanisms applied to all thought about actually dying, 
and the ironic difficulties of getting people to consider cryonics seriously.

Someone recently made a joke about recessive cryonics genes.  It may not 
be a joke.  Denial may have carried an evolutionary advantage when people 
couldn't prevent death, but that advantage has turned sour this century.

Another thought that occurs to me is that our intellect may have 
outstripped not just our emotions, but also our comprehension.  We 
regularly use numbers that we honestly cannot understand: the age and 
size of the universe, the speed of light, the population of the earth.... 
it requires constant work to find a meaningful measure, and denial may be 
an attempt to stay within the comprehensible rather than follow the 
intellect incomprehendingly.  

Which of the following figures, for example, are meaningful?
	Three per second
	A quarter million per day
	100,000,000 per year
Those are, in very rounded terms, the present human death rate.  Three 
per second we can imagine: Death wearing camouflage fatigues and walking 
through a crowded downtown, firing an AK-47, killing three per second.  
But we can only build the image for a certain number of seconds.  We 
can't actually imagine it extrapolated to a 24-hour period, and a quarter 
million dead; but every day we bring mass cryonics closer to reality, 
that's how many lives we will save.

Which brings me back to The Prospect of Immortality: if it had all 
happened as fast as Robert Ettinger expected, we would now have 
*billions* of people in storage.

Maybe revolutionary ideas just take a generation to catch hold in the 
popular mind.  If so, that tidal wave could be upon us any time: 
ultimately, three new patients per second, a quarter million per day....

Always optimistically?


Robin



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