X-Message-Number: 5950
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 20:39:55 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS RE:Cryonics/Legal/Gerbils

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In #5946  John Sharman <> On Sat, 16 Mar 96 Wrote:
                  

                >Death BY DEFINITION is an irreversible state.

If you want to use that definition of death it's fine by me. that just means 

that those frozen in liquid nitrogen are not dead, or at least may not be dead.
                   


                >The law, the sciences, medicine tend to have resort to
                
                >definitions because they are fields in which precision is
                                >important 

                  
Face it, it's all pretty hazy. I am quite certain you can not give me a 
precise, non circular definition of "definition".
                   


                >"Meanings" are  what you find set out in dictionaries and
                
                >can include definitions but do not have to do so in every
                                >case. 


Now that you've firmly established what death really is, we'll use the same  
technique again for something else. I've always wondered what the meaning of  

life is, now I know all I have to do is look up "Life" in the dictionary.

By itself a dictionary is nothing but one big circular definition.  All the 
definitions in a dictionary are made of words, and those  words also have 
definitions made of other words also in the dictionary, and round and round 
we go. The way out of this paradox is the fact that much, perhaps most,

of our knowledge in not in the dictionary because it is not made of words.

Dictionaries can be fun, but don't take them too seriously, especially in 
philosophy  where it's customary to push concepts to extremes to see where 
they'll break.  Usage, context and example is where meaning comes from,
that is after all, where the lexicographers  got the knowledge  to write 
their book in the first  place. They're ordinary people, they don't have 
knowledge about Nature that the rest of us don't have,  they don't have God's 
home telephone number or E mail address. 
                  


                >If a fair slice of the population believes that death is
                                >reversible, then that's that. 

                 
Well it's an original idea I'll give you that, determining a scientific fact 
from a popularity poll. OK folks let's have a  show of hands, who's in favor 
or the Schrodinger Wave Equation holding sway over the universe?
                   


                >If I take you at your word you are saying that a person once
                
                >legally dead can never be legally alive again whereas I know
                                >that you believe the contrary.
                     

You like definitions I'll give you one, I don't claim it's perfect but it's 
the best I've ever seen. "Legal Death" is the point at which government 
bureaucrat will finely grant us the right to do what we want with our own 
bodies. As the very name implies it's a legal term and has nothing to do with  
Science. You challenge us to find logic in this  and naturally we are unable  
to do so, because as I said, this has to do with the law, and there is no  
relationship between logic and the law, except perhaps an inverse one.
                   

               >BTW after a thunderstorm my phone was dead, but it's fine now.
                   
You mean, a deterministic machine was operating properly until some of the  
atoms in it were pushed by the thunderstorm into places where they could not 
interact with other parts of the phone and then the repair men put the atoms  
back into their original orientation so it functions just like it did before? 
Can you think of any reason why this wouldn't work for things other than  
telephones?


                                          John K Clark        

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