X-Message-Number: 5863
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: outmoded, backward notions of "death"
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 23:40:09 -0800 (PST)

Greetings once more!

How interesting it is to see one's name mentioned so often!

In any case, I haven't been on the Net myself for some time because I've been
busy with other things. 

HOWEVER: To Mr. Marshall Rice, I would point out first that even the notion of
death of cells is a faulty one, short of total destruction. THIS INCLUDES  
BRAIN CELLS. Right now and for many years now neuroscientists have been 
actively working to find ways to push back the so-called "3 minute limit". As 
I understand the situation, with the proper drugs and treatment by experts,
it is now possible to bring someone back after TEN MINUTES AT ROOM TEMPERATURE.
(Note that this is an increase of 7 minutes). This entire line of investigation
really started when Hossmann and Sato, in 1969, found that they could revive
the brains of cats after ONE HOUR at room temperature (cf SCIENCE, where they
published their paper. I can't get the cite for you now without going offline,
and if you want to actually search out original papers rather than just 
repeat what you have heard, then all the better. And if you really do start
exploring this matter for yourself, you will find first that your beliefs are
badly out of date, and second that I have done no more than repeat the 
beliefs of scientific workers in the area. Hossmann and Kato, with their
1969 experiment, raised strong questions about the entire issue of brain
death and its reversibility. Neuroscientists still feel the reverberations). 

So what does this tell us about the "3 minute limit"? Well, I guess there
wasn't any such limit. Do we assume now that we have a "10 minute limit" 
instead? What do we do when it lengthens to 12 minutes? Start talking about
a "12 minute limit"? Do you seriously believe that a present inability to
bring someone back to life after X minutes means that we will never be
able to bring them back after X + 1 minutes? X + 2 minutes?

At some point it becomes wise to take a more general view. You have heard
the comments about information by other cryonicists here. I would not claim
that is a complete solution, since we need to know WHAT information, but it is
miles ahead of simply accepting current abilities as the best we will ever
have. 

One further error you make in discussing whether or not it will be possible
to recover a high percentage of our brain connections comes from an obvious
implicit belief that such recovery must happen sequentially: ie. one day
someone gets to work and says, ah, this connects to that, and this connects
to that, ... and so on for thousands of years. NOT AT ALL. If and when 
recovery becomes possible, it will clearly happen by looking at our brain 
in parallel, with many cooperating systems simultaneously working. That, of
course, is essentially the way our bodies and even our brains work now:
biochemistry works on lots of molecules at once, not at one at a time. Even
in the very early days of cryonics (the late 60's) cryonicists were thinking
about how repair might be done. One early suggestion was that of a highly
modified virus. No, this doesn't mean just ONE virus, it meant many of them,
all working at the same time. Now such ideas have come to be called nano-
technology, and nanotechnology of various kinds has started to raise its
head in many other contexts, too. And don't think that we stopped with
viruses... that original idea was only a start. Nor should it be seen
as unprecedented: a drug basically consists of a special molecule which
when put into the proper milieu begins to work on many other molecules in
your body, in parallel because there are many molecules of drug. So the
next step from that would be a set of cooperating drugs ... and from that
we can see how any repair system could be arbitrarily complex.

So let us suppose that we DO find ways to repair our injured brains (and
forget for a moment that cryonic suspension may soon improve to such an
extent that our brains are no longer injured). Will we be in that repaired
brain? Suppose all the connections had been broken, but that by careful
examination of the clues left by the damage, every connection had been
recovered. Are you going to claim that we are then gone? Just what 
physical damage will cause us to disappear? We have just as many grounds
to believe that we would awaken (in this case) as we have to believe that
we will be the same person tomorrow as we are today. We are not sets of
molecules, or even cells, but a structure formed of these molecules
and cells, which change constantly: much more like a wave or a waterfall
than like a rock. That is what cryonicists mean when they speak of the 
INFORMATION. Yes, you may argue against this criterion if you wish, but 
please don't fall back on inadequate notions of "death". 

If you want more information, send a direct message to me and I can get you
started. If you really want to argue against cryonics, and you aren't 
just playing, then you will not do so without knowing more about why we
think it stands a significant chance of success. 

			Best and even long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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