X-Message-Number: 5760
From: 
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 13:10:28 -0500
Subject: SCI. CRYONICS "impossible" repair

Marshall Rice has posted various messages on the "impossibility" of reviving
a person from  "dead meat." John de Rivaz and others have provided some
pretty good partial responses, and I should probably just ignore it, but I'll
throw in a few bits worth and heroically restrain myself from using some
colorful adjectives to characterize Mr. Rice's thought processes.

1. (Minor comment.)  He uses the word "impossible" and also says he cannot
"conceive" etc. I learned at a VERY early age that the limits of the possible
and the limits of my ability to conceive are not the same.

2. On the theoretical/philosophical level he appears--shall we say--naive. He
thinks he knows the defining features of self and consciousness and
individuality, or their necessary and sufficient conditions, when in fact
these things are unknown. (Granted, he isn't alone in thinking his opinions
constitute fact.) He appears to be quite ignorant of the voluminous
literature on criteria of identity or criteria of survival.

3. He thinks every neural pathway must be saved or repaired or reconstituted
if the individual is to survive. But these pathways are constantly changing
in the ordinary course of  life, and unless he is prepared to argue that
continuity can substitute for identity (an exceedingly weak argument), this
criterion must be abandoned.

4. Further, when he speaks of "every neural pathway," he ignores or hasn't
realized the fact that MOST neural pathways relate merely to "computational"
features of the brain, and not to anything irreplaceable.

5. His analogy about progressively destroying books is inapt, but doesn't
succeed anyway.  The U.S. embassy in Iran used paper shredders to destroy
records at the time of the Iranian revolution, but those crazies just sat
down with the shreds and put them back together, and read our documents. Even
charred and partly burned records have been reconstituted--and that with
present or earlier technology. Many people give lip service  to the potential
of future technology, but few really mean it or understand that potential. 

6. He wants to use "onset of cellular death" as the criterion of
forever-impossible repair. He seems sometimes vaguely to concede that
"destruction" and "death" are matters of degree, but in the next moment seems
to forget it. "Death"--cellular or otherwise--is usually defined as
"irreversible loss of vital functions," but of course reversibility is a
question  of time and technology, hence "death" is always a PROGNOSIS, not a
diagnosis.

7. He says the onset of tissue death is usually three minutes after ischemia
sets in. This is not true. Many experimental mammals, and several humans
(going back at least to the 1970 work of Hossmann & Sato), have been revived
after as much as an hour of ishemia and anoxia. His "usually" doesn't save
him either, because there is abundant evidence that often, if not usually,
the failure to revive does NOT imply that there was "death" after three
minutes, but that appropriate measures were not taken to prevent
recirculation failure.

8. The main point is that he is ignoring (and probably ignorant of) the
substantial experimental evidence of survival of many or most features of
anatomy and physiology of the brain after varying periods of post mortem
ischemia, warm and cold; and in particular that synaptosomes appear rather
hardy with respect to post mortem changes and with respect to freeze/thaw
treatment. 

9. Finally, he fails to distinguish between favorable and unfavorable
conditions of  cryonic suspension. Some of our Cryonics Institute patients
have had to wait only a couple of minutes between clinical death and
treatment, and by no stretch of the imagination could any reasonable person
deny that they were then still mostly alive. 

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society


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