X-Message-Number: 4631
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #4629 - #4630
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 10:49:42 -0700 (PDT)

Re: My own posting on Cryonet $4629

I have now looked at the WWW posting which I discussed in the previous 
Cryonet. It looks to me even worse than his article in CRYONICS, basically
because in his recent CRYONICS article on the same subject, he did make a nod
(referring to work of Tad Hogg, at Xerox) toward some kind of verification 
of the second clause of his syllogism. To those who haven't read my first 
posting, I pointed out that Ralph Merkle consistently produces some quite 
inarguable truth from cryptography or mathematics and then, without any 
serious attempt to show that it really applies to our possibilities for 
revival when frozen with current methods, concludes that it DOES apply and 
therefore we need not worry about our suspension technology.

In his CRYONICS article he quotes Tad Hogg as saying that the method discussed
worked on a large majority of problems, that usually there would be a very
sharp boundary between an area in which the problem was "easily" solvable and
one in which many solutions were possible (ie. the information needed to limit
the computed brain structure to our own has been lost). Again, I do not dispute
Hogg's statement so much as ask just what field of problems for which he is 
making this statement. Without such a discussion SPECIFIC TO OUR BRAINS we
have again no more than the statement that "probably our suspension will work".
Has Dr. Hogg specifically considered the issues involved in suspension? Do
we fall in the area where the information does not specify our brain well

enough or in the area where it does? Is Dr. Hogg's choice of problems biased? --
after all, very few people try to solve problems which they can easily 
see are unsolvable. 

And finally, I personally consider the work done by Mike Darwin and others
in preserving brains at high concentrations of glycerol to be not only a   
significant advance but also an answer to one of the major problems about
preservation of information. Although the point has not yet been proven, a high
consensus of neurobiologists has come to suspect that our memories are encoded
in the actual presence or absence of connections between our neurons, at a 
very small and nongeneric scale. Darwin's methods look as if they will actually
preserve that connectivity. As for the fact that such high concentrations of
glycerol poison the cells, we do need to look closely at just why that happens;
given that it happens at very low temperatures, it may not even be caused by
a chemical reaction. This work isn't the end of our task. Yet it may well 
establish BY DIRECT EXPERIMENTAL MEANS something which no amount of theory 
alone could show: preservation of information. If so, it puts an end to any
relevance of the purely theoretical arguments made by Ralph Merkle --- and
myself. 

And there is nothing which I could welcome more.

			Long long life,

			Thomas Donaldson


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