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/

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