X-Message-Number: 5470
From: 
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 1995 13:39:22 -0500
Subject: non-suspensions & misc.

Jim Yount of ACS discusses (#5466) the question of what happens if
a cryonics organization fails to suspend a member and still receives the
funding, as through life insurance. For example, would this possibility be
seen
as an incentive for the organization to fail to suspend, or fail to use
maximum effort to suspend?

First of all, the Cryonics Institute uses a contract with a Rider A which has
two versions, of which the member chooses one. Version 1 says that,
in event the member is not or cannot be suspended, for whatever reason, the
money (less CI expenses for any work done) goes to the member's estate.
Version 2 says that we keep the money anyway. The advantage of version 1 is
obvious, if the member has relatives about whose financial welfare he has
some
concern. The advantage of version 2 is that it removes an incentive for the
relatives to attempt to interfere with the suspension or prevent it (in
addition to helping strengthen the organization and movement, which the
member
wants to do).

It should be obvious that the danger of relatives trying to interfere for
financial reasons is MUCH greater than the danger of a cryonics
organization placing "profit" above the welfare of the member or patient.  In
the case of the Cryonics Institute, for example, we are truly nonprofit;
there
are no stockholders and no paid officers or directors; no one in control
stands to make a nickel out of CI operations. Further, it should be obvious
that our primary asset is our integrity and our reputation for integrity,
and that our own lives (as well as those of our relatives and friends already
in
cryostasis)  are at stake in maintaining this integrity. 

Occasionally a member or prospective member will express concern
about our handling of money,e.g. in the context of whether or not to prepay
the suspension fee. My answer (in part) is that, if you cannot trust us
with your money, why would you trust us with your person? Of course, "trust"
does not preclude the continuing effort to improve policies and procedures,
or the possibility of using backups of one sort or another. But it remains
true that your money is less important than your person, and your choice of
an organization should revolve primarily around that. The old saw
still holds: Before you invest, investigate.

Incidentally, Jim speaks of the possibility of disinheriting a relative who
contests the member's will or cryonics arrangements. Such a clause
in a will might be psychologically helpful, but my amateur understanding is
that it has no legal force. This is because no legal document can require
someone to do something illegal, nor prevent someone from exercising his
rights
under law. The relative has a right to seek judicial relief, and no legal
document can prevent him doing so or penalize him for doing so.

Ken Wolfe (#5467) asks about ages of members and patients: Are
there some additional ones older than 95? Yes, Cryonics Institute has
members/patients older than 95 or older than 95 at time of death.

John Clark(#5464) has a non sequitur as follows. In a previous message he
said (in the context of the evolutionary value of consciousness) that it
would be easier (for us?) to build a system with consciousness than without.
I said this doesn't follow, because bad engineering is easier than good
engineering and first attempts are seldom the best. Now he says that such
(early and clumsy) systems would be inefficient. Of course--but that doesn't
address the question, which was the ease of building a conscious vs. a
non-conscious system....For that matter, why talk about "would"--why not talk
about what HAS happened?   We HAVE designed many computer systems; the
earlier ones were simpler, cruder, and less efficient, and we STILL are
nowhere near building a conscious system, if indeed that is even possible on
an inorganic substrate.

If he meant it would be easier for NATURE to build a conscious system than
one without consciousness, again just look at the record. There are countless
systems in nature that appear to lack consciousness and almost certainly do
lack it; there is basically only ONE system that has it for sure, viz. the
mammalian brain or perhaps the vertebrate brain, or in the broadest case the
organic nervous system.

The USEFULNESS or efficiency of an elegant system is not the same thing as
the ease of making one--if anything, the correlation is inverse.

Another book (among several) that I am still looking at is MIND, BRAIN &
QUANTUM; THE COMPOUND 'I' by Michael Lockwood, Blackwell (U.K.) 1989. He
gives more credence than most to the possibility, advanced notably by
Penrose, that consciousness may involve quantum processes in the brain that
are "non-computable" at least in the usual sense. This might involve standing
waves and body-temperature superconductivity over relatively large regions of
the brain. (As far as I can see so far, however, he fails to distinguish
between consciousness and feeling or to characterize the relation between
them.)

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society 


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