X-Message-Number: 5075 Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 23:53:29 -0500 From: "Keith F. Lynch" <> Subject: Re: Non-cryonics issues, Stodolsky, anti-big-government, etc In #5068, Robin Helweg-Larsen <> writes: > I've also lived in Denmark for five years, and am familiar with > the need to have a social security number (which incorporates your > birth-date in it), and to inform the police of your new address > within five days of changing residence, etc. This doesn't bother > me (boarding school was a lot worse). Boarding school is for children. Adults shouldn't be treated like children. Someone should be treated as a criminal if they steal, rape, or kill. You think a peaceful and honest person should be treated as a criminal if they refuse to carry papers, or to inform the police of their whereabouts? > The thought of a country with no government, ... is worrying. I haven't seen anyone on this list argue in favor of anarchy. But to suggest that doctors or patients would be better off if the government was a doctors' only possible employer is frightening. For one thing, a patient is unlikely to be able to get unique services, such as cryonics, this way. This summer, I took a vacation in Europe. I have bad teeth, and I could have spent that money on having them fixed, instead. But I made the choice I made, and I don't regret it. I wouldn't want to live in a country in which this choice was stolen from me, in which I was compelled to pay (via taxes) for perfect teeth, whether or not that was what I would choose to spend my money on. What is the value of perfect teeth? What is the value of a vacation? What is the value of a life-saving surgical operation? What is the value of being cryonically suspended? It isn't infinite -- there isn't yet enough money in the world to give every ill person every possible medical treatment that might help. But wherever the line is drawn, some people will be condemned to death. Should government be the one to draw this line? To evaluate people based on political pull, social utility, whether they know the right people in the right political party, age, race, religion, etc? Or should it be triage via waiting list, in which if 100 people need a life-saving treatment, and the government has allocated resources to treat 60, the 100 will be forced to wait until 40 of them have died? Or perhaps a lottery? Or a TV show whose viewers vote by phone on which patient's pleading was the most pathetic and moving? I maintain that the only moral way to make this choice is for the patient to make the choice. Let each individual allocate their own resources based on their own unique set of values. Some will choose to spend money on the best possible medical insurance, and will live a spartan lifestyle. Others will choose to live lavishly, and to take the risk that they will someday need medical treatment that they won't be able to afford. Yet others will choose to do the work they love, even if it pays so little that they can afford neither a lavish lifestyle nor top-notch medical insurance. Is this any more irrational than mountain climbing, hang gliding, or smoking, in which it's fairly likely that one will end up dead with no possible treatment? (In fact, smoking kills more people than medicine saves, as shown by the mortality statistics of religious groups which avoid both tobacco and doctors -- they live longer and healthier than the population as a whole!) Why is medicine so expensive? A big part of the reason is that the government grants licensed doctors a legal monopoly on the practice of medicine, and on the prescribing of drugs. Government is protecting us to death. > When you're suspended, and can't act for yourself, you better have a > good government at all levels: ... I agree totally. I think the single biggest risk to suspended patients is a government which decides that cryonics is an unnecessary waste of precious natural resources, or that it's a fraud and the patients were deluded and need to be protected from their folly, or that it consists of medicine being practiced without a license, or that the patient care funds represent a handy source of government revenue given that it is "owned" by people who can't vote or complain, or that no place on the planet is zoned for cryonics, or that no medical care should ever be provided to anyone over age 70, or that it's "unfair" for some people to be cryopreserved when others aren't. Another major risk is that general technological progress will be slowed by government red tape, regulations, taxation, borrowing (which siphons off money that would otherwise have been invested in furthering some productive activity), or inane ideology (such as communism or the-sky-is-falling environmentalism), such that cryonic repair technologies are not developed during the lifetime of currently existing cryonics organizations or their successors. > And.... maybe you want people to go through your mind and reconstruct > your personality? Guess what! They're going to know more about you > than you even know yourself - they'll have to, to be able to do a > good job! They'll know your conscious, subconscious, unconscious, > preconscious, reflexes, predilections, crimes and misdemeanors. I doubt it. In general it's easier to repair individual parts than to fully understand the interrelationships of those parts (e.g. you can recognize a crack, or a loose wire, or eroded gear teeth, or crosslinked proteins, or a burned out light bulb, or a brittle parchment, or a dead battery, and take the appropriate corrective actions without understanding the system into which whatever you fixed fits). -- Keith Lynch, http://www.access.digex.net/~kfl/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5075