X-Message-Number: 7563
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7554 - #7558
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1997 23:18:30 -0800 (PST)

To Mike Perry:

Thanks for mentioning PERIASTRON! I sent my own message privately, expecting
that the others would speak up for themselves, and did not insist that my
newsletter be included -- after all, he's the author, not us!

But thanks anyway, especially since you're a third person.


To Paul Wakfer:

While I most certainly support you in the Prometheus effort, and intend to
do so, I must add some comments about your latest posting.

First of all, there really has been a lot of research on how memory works 
over the last few years. That's what PERIASTRON has covered for just as long.
I will give you a test (based on what is known about memory) for its
survival (and for other reasons, this comes down to a test for OUR survival).
It is a test which can answer YES, but not yet (maybe not for a long time
yet) give a NO answer:

If the connectivity of our brain, and our genes, survive, we survive.

This is intended to be the weakest possible test; revival, in the strict
sense, is strictly impossible if and only if the information required to
reconstruct us has been destroyed. The problem with NO answers is that this
test leaves quite open the possibility that connectivity might be 
INFERRED indirectly rather than found directly. How far that could go,
I don't know. I can specify, however, some ways in which such inferences
might be done.

Note that viability of neurons (or indeed ANY cell) in the classical sense
is not required by this test. Note also that with the right software (the
kind of neural nets we are has not yet been studied by computer people) we
could get a very good idea of just how our memories might be degraded by
the damage due to freezing.

I am hardly eager to be frozen with cryonics technology in the state
which it is now in. However, I'll also say that we have no good grounds at
all for either a pessimistic or an optimistic assessment of what may become
possible in the future.

I disagree deeply with Ralph Merkle and Eric Drexler about the likely 
merit of THEIR version of nanotechnology. However, I must add that my own
attitude towards the possibility of eventual repair was strongly affected
when I began reading about biochemistry, not as a description of how we
work but as a description of the general kinds of things which will someday
become possible for us. Incidentally, in terms of what it can do now,
biotechnology is at least a light year ahead of Drexlerian-Merklian 
nanotechnology, which has not gotten further than theoretical simulations
in computers. It looks to me that it can go megaparsecs further before
exhaustion.

My real problem with present methods, as rickety as they are, comes not
from any strong belief that they are unlikely to work, but from (what I
think of as) a more reasonable view of how fast the required technology will
really be developed. As you know well, some cryonicists think that we need
do nothing because nanotechnology will arrive in 30 years and solve all the
many problems with cryonics. Perhaps so, but only if we multiply 30 by 
10 and generalize our notion of nanotechnology. And 300 years is not a 
trivial time to wait in suspension. Too much can go wrong, even just by
simple accident. When you add all the other things 300 years of history 
has brought (we're talking about going as far as from the 1600's to the 
1900's, or even longer) it just doesn't look the safest.

Which isn't to say that if I had just deanimated, or were facing destruction
of my brain, I wouldn't want to be suspended. I think of it as a lifeboat:
except for the small detail that the comfortable ocean liner you happen
to be riding also happens to be sinking, the lifeboat looks shaky, unsafe,
uncomfortable, and VERY uncertain. But no, it's still not sinking! That's
something. Hardly very much, but still something.

As for Prometheus, I'd be foolish not to want a BETTER lifeboat, wouldn't I?

			Best and a long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson


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