X-Message-Number: 5951 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: For Merel, Soreff, Owen Lewis, and John Clark Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 00:02:10 -0800 (PST) Hi again: 1. To Peter Merel: What matters in terms of the number of people that Tasmania (or wherever) can support is just how many THEIR technology can support. To us, Tasmania is quite large enough to support a whole country. To the original Tasmanians, it could support far fewer people. I'd have to hunt up the reference, but I understand that even without the arrival of Europeans the Tasmanians were slowly decreasing in number and would have eventually become extinct. If you want to claim that ALL civilizations destroy themselves, then I don't see how you can argue that case from past history. Certainly civilizations can change, and in that sense destroy themselves, but those which make their milieu impossible for any successor to survive are much more rare. One country (or civilization) has, of course, destroyed or severely damaged another by damaging its environment, but that is yet a different case (I think of the extensive irrigation system in Mesopotamia, apparently kept working for thousands of years until the Mongols invaded and destroyed it). I will, however, make one point close to yours. I do not believe that human beings will last indefinitely unless they go into space, eventually in a big way. We are close to pushing the limits of the planet Earth: not so close as environmentalists claim, but close in terms of hundreds of years. I don't see any essential problems to settling space, but it's not something for the next 5 years. Nanotechnology or not, we will run into resource problems if we do not (nanotechnology, of course, may may going into space much easier too --- it may have already started to do that, with the Martin-Douglas reusable rocket, one stage to orbit, that they are testing now). But if we do not we will enter into a long decline and finally die out. And perhaps to annoy some readers, I'd say that many environmentalists would probably oppose any idea of going into space, just as they opposed nuclear energy and various other things which would make the world a cleaner place and decrease our load on the ecosystem. Fundamentally, some environmentalists seem to want our extinction to happen, as soon as possible --- perhaps so the birds and fish can continue their Darwinian activities until the next asteroid strikes the Earth. 2. About freezing damage, for Jeff Soreff: I don't know of the specific article by Mike, but I will say this. His own recent work at Biopreservation, as discussed in the 4 July issue of CRYOCARE REPORT, looks to me to be a good deal more friendly. If we have 1 micron pieces of tissue broken off, then they won't be able to move far just because they are surrounded by other tissue remains. It's not as if (even when thawed) this tissue is diluted by water. Instead you would have a very thick slurry, with corresponding limits on how fast any piece could move. Even in the worst case discussed in that article, the damage, however, didn't look to be the kind you describe. Furthermore, if we DO expect such a thing to happen when someone is revived, we would do the obvious thing to stop it from happening: while it is thawing, put into the mix something which makes the pieces move even more slowly. This would take a lot of biochemical/chemical knowledge to design such a solution, but the normal fixatives for biological preparations provide a start. Other cryonicists have suggested much more complex systems which might actually work on the tissue before it thaws; just how far we need to go here (I believe) remains an open question. (If we devised a suitable gell which was at the same time accessible to our repair systems, that would solve the problem even at temperatures in which water was liquid). 3. To John Clark: You talk as if Deep Blue were a responsible agent. Deep Blue comes nowhere near to being a responsible agent; it is just a big and fast computer. Those who programmed it are the responsible agents here, and Kasparov beat them and not Deep Blue. And if you believe that any computer that now exists is a responsible agent, golly, you're pretty far gone. I say this not because I believe that we cannot SOMEDAY devise computers/machines/ devices of some kind which ARE responsible agents, but because we have not yet done that. (The fact that Deep Blue could beat them in chess means nothing: my Apple IIGS can calculate faster than I can, but remains a tool, not an agent). As for intelligence, I don't believe it can be compared to "elegance". That is the key point I was making: we really do need to understand it better before we can have any hope of manipulating it. Your simile of an elegant proof actually reinforces my point: anyone who can see that a proof is elegant must first understand a great deal about the mathematics involved. Otherwise the proof is not elegant, it is meaningless. Not only that, but again: if you were asked to write a program which was elegant, with no other restrictions, I suspect that you'd think a bit and ask for something more in terms of specification. Sure, you'd think. I can write an elegant program, or at least one which looks to me like its elegant. But will this contractee actually pay me for it? Why should he do so when he can just turn around and claim that it's NOT elegant and I haven't fulfilled the contract? Who is to decide and how are they to decide? There is a very big gulf between common ways of speaking about how we think and the chemical and electrical processes which take place in living brains. We have several different kinds of memory, to start, not just one (the number hasn't yet been worked out). We and other primates have special circuits to recognize faces of members of our own species, and elaborate circuitry to see (some) colors and (some) shapes. We have lots of other modules to carry out other processes. Special circuitry for social interaction is present, too. One consequence of that, seen in people with damaged brains, is that sometimes these abilities become dissociated from one another in spectacular ways. If I cannot recognize anyone else's face, but can do vector calculus, am I or am I not intelligent? Or suppose that I can see and remember far more than the normal number of animals and plants, but find it quite impossible to even understand and remember the appearance and use of a hammer or screwdriver? Or suppose that I have ONLY learned numbers, not figuratively but literally: I know and recognize nothing else, have to be fed by a caretaker, dressed, taken to the toilet by a caretaker: but can give you a very fast answer to whether or not a BIG number is a prime? And see Fermat's Last Theorem as obvious, but cannot explain why to anyone? Is that intelligence? (I just described something which comes close to an actual case: two twins in an institution who sat by themselves and told prime numbers to one another, nothing else, all day long. And those prime numbers were not obvious, but very large). Is such a person intelligent? And when we start thinking of other animals, or of computers, the number of possible processing grows tremendously. Where is the intelligence in all of these abilities? Or do you want some other brain module, as yet undefined, to do something we don't yet understand? And if so, what? 4. To Owen: I doubt that you have had any of the experiences to which you allude when you say that some things can be worse than death. You are only thoughtlessly repeating something you have heard many times. Not only that, but those which come to my mind, and which I have come close to having, if anything reinforce my aim to be cryonically suspended. I refer to such things as losing my ability to think while still kept alive (just what my brain tumor threatened to do). That is exactly why I fought the lawsuit, in fact: I wanted to be suspended before that could happen. Certainly I can imagine other problems, but none of them is likely to happen: what if someone could take control of me, for instance, forcing me to do what they wanted rather than what I wanted, as if I were their toy. And (again hypothetically) I would risk a great deal, including my life, to avoid that. But hypotheses hypotheses hypotheses: I know of nothing REAL or LIKELY that would make me choose death over suspension. Best, and long long life, Thomas Donaldson 3. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5951