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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3838