X-Message-Number: 5998 From: Brian Wowk <> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 23:56:43 -0600 Subject: Death In <> John Sharman <> writes: >> You have precisely hit the nail on the head. Nobody (not even >> cryonicists) believes that the dead can be brought back by >> *non-supernatural* means. >Remember where this limb of the discussion started, Brian. You said that >"death" was "by definition irreversible"; when challenged you indicated >that it was "death" in common parlance to which you had referred. You >have now by implication conceded that a reasonable chunk of the >population (i.e. the mass of people whose usage indicates what "common >parlance" is) actually think that death is reversible but not by >"natural" means. Well that's okay; heart transplants aren't "natural" >either. As John apparently believes that transplant surgeons operate in the realm of the supernatural, it appears that more definitions are necessary. For the purposes of this discussion, "natural" = consistent with the laws of physics, "supernatural" = inconsistent with laws of physics (i.e. divine intervention). I did not bother expanding "irreversible" to "irrersible by non-supernatural means" in my initial definition of death as the latter is self-evidently redundant. NOTHING is irreversible if supernatural means are are admitted to consideration. >> So what happens if you call frozen people >> dead? People then expect that frozen people can only be revived >> by supernatural means, which leads to >> >> * The belief that revival is scientifically impossible. >> >> * The belief that cryonics is un-Christian, "playing God", >> defying the will of God, or trucking with the Devil. >> >> * The belief that cryonics can't work because the soul >> will have departed. >> >> * Shlocky grade B horror movies in which revived cryonics >> patients are inhabited by evil spirits. >> >> * uk.legal posters who say that success in cryonics >> is equivalent to the creation of "living, breathing zombies." >> >> I think you get the idea. I've seen all of the above (and much more) >> in my ten years of cryonics work. The charaterization of cryonics >> patients as "dead" will everytime conjur up an enormous pile of >> emotional baggage that makes further rational discussion *impossible*. >Unfortunately, they *are* (perhaps potentially reversibly) dead. The >fact that you don't like to call them dead doesn't make them any the >less dead. You are in effect complaining about widespread ignorance. Can >you not see that the cure for ignorance is education, not a pretence >that black is white? Suppose you are neurosurgeon. For the first time you are going to treat an otherwise inoperable aneurism by cooling the patient to 20'C, removing their blood, and stopping their heart for a full hour. You must explain the procedure to the patient and his family. Do you a) Tell them that you are going to stop the heart and use cooling and special drugs to try and keep the brain viable during the procedure so that the heart can be restarted later, and the patient's life saved? b) Tell them that you are going to kill the patient, leave him dead during the operation, but resurrect him from the dead at the end (hoping his soul will come back from heaven, and God will not be too upset with you for trampling on his turf)? I'll give you one guess which one is used in real life. You say that the cure for ignorance is eduction. Let us then specify the precise nature of the eduction problem. The problem faced by cryonics and medicine today is the collision between the ancient beliefs that stopped metabolism = death and that death = a supernatural realm where God, not science, holds sway. Since medicine has now shown that stopping and starting metabolism is a purely technical procedure without any supernatural component, both beliefs can no longer be simultaneously true. Which belief should our education process focus on reforming? I say teach people that stopped metabolism is not in itself fatal. You say teach people that medicine can resurrect the dead. I think the former is self-evidently a much easier course, and this indeed is the course that modern medicine has chosen when it explains concepts like hyopthermic circulatory arrest to patients and the public. Perhaps you do not find the above self-evident. Well, there is another test we can apply. Let us ask which of the above education choices results in a calmer, more intelligent discussion of cryonics. This experiment has been done. For 25 years cryonics tried your approach. Audiences were told that cryonics is freezing dead people, but cryonics may still work because death is sometimes reversible. Discussions then invariably got bogged down in supernaturalisms (examples of which I've already given) not science. Then about 8 years ago, I thought we should try the more sensible approach that medicine itself was taking. Specifically, explain to people that no one is dead until they are beyond all possible physical means of recovery. This approach was implemented in my first drafts of Alcor's Cryonics: Reaching for Tomorrow handbook, and in cryonics talks by people like Steve Bridge. The result was an immediate elevation of discussion away from issues like "Where does the soul go?" to "What is the nature of freezing injury?" and "What evidence is there that nanotechnology can work?" The is the best proof that my definition of death (or, shall I say, my forced clarification of popular parlance) is the best definition for fostering public understanding of difficult medical issues. >Agreed. But whether or not they are "dead" is a matter of language in >which all speakers of the language (literally) "have their say". Not when the purveyors of the stopped metabolism = death school use this definition as a trojan horse to unload piles of metaphysical garbage that are irrelevant to the scientific issues at hand. Even if you do not engage in this tactic yourself, if you defend this definition you will enthusiastically supply the horse for those who will. Do you want public discussion of cryonics and low-temperature medicine to focus on the technical merits (or lack thereof) of these procedures, or spurious theology? It's your choice. *************************************************************************** Brian Wowk CryoCare Foundation 1-800-TOP-CARE President Your Gateway to the Future http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5998