X-Message-Number: 4608 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: CryoNet #4593 - #4600 Date: Tue, 4 Jul 1995 23:38:15 -0700 (PDT) Hi again! To John Clark: It seems that we agree on something: that purpose depends on the person, and to ask any other entity what your own purpose is will never (by the nature of the question) give you a satisfactory answer. As for Dawkins, I'm dubious that he meant his ideas about how our genes act to be a statement of purpose. There is a MECHANISM there, certainly, but mechanism does not imply purpose. The notion that there is any special purpose in how our genes, or our brain, or any other side of our human nature are put together misunderstands the entire theory of evolution by natural selection. Evolution tells us no more about our purpose than does a rock. We find that purpose in ourselves rather than from any natural event or process. More on fear: It is a pity that common language is so poorly tuned that it is hard to express such feelings as those of fear without implying lots of other baggage too. I do not want to die. I want to live. And this want of mine is so intense that it causes all kinds of reactions in my body when I meet something which might thwart it. We know from animals that fear, flight, and combativeness can be very close to one another, and that insight needs to somehow be applied to our own emotional reactions. Depending on circumstance, one can turn into the other in an instant. I believe that our current words simply do not describe the real emotions that we feel. Usually if all action to prevent an intensely painful or disliked event has been made impossible, an animal (or a person) will go through a period of agitation and even rage, after which it seems to lose all signs of caring. But if the animal can do something about what happens ie. it has some control over whether or not these events occur, then it will behave very differently. Sometimes it may run away, sometimes it will confront things directly. Either response may be rational, depending on circumstance. To say that fighting or flight is a sign of "fear" mistakes what happens in the mind of that animal. Feelings such as dread attach much more to events which we cannot control than they do to those which we can. Am I agreeing with Michael Riskin? Well, yes, and no. (The word "wants" or "desires" carry no fires with them, though I intend them to suggest, at least sometimes, very great intensity). Anyone who claims that cryonicists suffer from fear has mistaken what has happened ... so easy, since few people even now understand cryonics. We act as we do because we believe that we CAN do something about death, an event which we very much do not want to happen. They, believing that they can do nothing, have lost all signs of caring. And with that loss, they look on us and fail to understand at all. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4608