X-Message-Number: 7586
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7570 - #7578
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 23:14:17 -0800 (PST)

Hi again!

First of all, I want to apologize to Alcor and Alcor staff for the implication,
in a previous message, that they were wrong in keeping Visser's cryoprotectant
secret from me. In order to learn of it themselves, Visser required them to
sign to keep it secret. The principle I stated, though, remains, and points at
Visser herself.

Second, I will note that all the complaints about Virodene are complaints 
that Established Procedures Were Not Followed. Not one produces hard evidence
that it does not work. Sure, it may not work, but Charles Platt's posting
fails completely to show that.

Third, I very strongly agree with Fred Chamberlain's piece on cryonics.

This is hard to get into people's heads, I know very well. But the fundamental
assumption of cryonics isn't that freezing will preserve you, nor that 
the current definition of death is wrong, nor even that suspended animation is
imminent. The FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION is that even the most advanced medicine
of our time, and those who practice it, are deeply ignorant about what we
will someday be able to do -- even medically, in cases which they would 
describe as hopeless or "dead"... or even, as some of these people have
said, "no better than ground meat".  

Sure, lots of these leading lights of today's medicine won't like our 
message. For that matter, since we use many of their techniques and methods,
--- after all, they ARE the best available now --- we walk a thin line
ourselves. 

And we happen to have a technology (freezing, ideally with much more
sophistication than simply dumping you in liquid nitrogen) which will 
preserve you indefinitely. Sure, it damages you a lot. That's why we don't
claim it's anywhere close to suspended animation. But hey: who are you, or
anyone, to claim on the basis of present medical technology (!!!) that
we will not somehow work out someday a means to revive you? If you claim
that, you claim that all our work on medicine has almost come to an end,
we now in 1997 have finally reached the pinnacle of knowledge. Only a 
little history of medicine shows how popular such a belief is, and how
false it constantly turns out to be.

Oh, you say we are unusual? So said all of them before.

Not only that, but the logic of cryonics does not require us to even 
provide a HINT of how your problems after suspension might be fixed or
how you might be revived. If my only tools are of chipped stone, I am
unlikely to imagine metals or plastics, and computers will be totally
beyond me. We suspend our patients, and keep them suspended, NOT because
we can specify at all just how they can be fixed, but because we have a 
means to take them to some time, even centuries from now, when means will
to repair them will be freely available. 

Yes, all serious cryonicists have spent time wondering just how repair
might be done, and come up with various ideas. If you really understand
cryonics, though, you should not demand one or the other such solution: what
you must do is get fixed firmly in your head that WE DO NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND
THE UNIVERSE NOR DO WE FULLY UNDERSTAND HOW PEOPLE AND THE UNIVERSE
INTERACT. And part of that interaction is the result of cryonic suspension
applied in a case in which we ourselves, with our Stone Age imaginations,
cannot see how revival might ever be possible. Not only that, but without
a set of possibilities on which our calculations of probability can work,
no one can validly give even a PROBABILITY that any given cryonic
suspension will be successful. (There you are, chipping stone, and you 
claim you can set out ALL the possibilities involved in repair? Nonsense!
It's only because your audience is just as ignorant as you that you aren't
simply laughed into oblivion).

But there is also another hard lesson we must learn as cryonicists, too.
It's one that many have learned in the past, though few have taken to 
heart: IF WE DON'T DO IT NO ONE WILL.

I've watched work on nanotechnology: almost all who publish in that area are 
interested not in reviving cryonic suspension patients but in ELECTRONICS.
And when they do chemistry or biochemistry, it's heart disease or cancer.
Or in the case of cryobiology, means to preserve everything but brains.   
If we really want ANY of these technologies to help us do better suspensions
(for which revival is easier, and maybe someday even we have a kind we even
know how to revive) then WE MUST DO IT OURSELVES. To use nanotechnology,
or any other technology now known or imaginable, as an excuse for doing
nothing is a recipe to make sure nothing will be done. 

If someday a technology or set of technologies is developed to revive our
current worst-case suspensions, just who do you think will develop it? 
Invaders from Andromeda? Children of the day playing with their (equivalent)
chemistry sets? It will be developed by cryonicists, as a result of 
many years, even centuries of work on how to revive such people.

Brian Wowk can say whatever he wishes. But I will point out that even if
we were to have a perfected suspended animation, we would still have to 
deal with our present ignorance --- in medicine, in physics, and all other
fields. Why, after all, would anyone want to take advantage of suspended 
animation? AS A MEANS TO FIND A CURE FOR THEIR DISEASE, BECAUSE NO 
CURE IS NOW KNOWN. It is the people whose cases are labelled "hopeless".
Nor can we validly give them a "probability" that they will become
curable --- for the very same reasons as before. The only practical
difference comes again from ignorance about just how far our medicine
may someday reach: ignorance which might declare that if suspended
animation fails they must then be labelled "hopeless". Why then and
not before? Why not go farther? A Congress of 1000 Ignorant WitchDoctors
has no better ability to tell us what future medicine may bring than 
a single one of them. They may be deeply offended that we point out 
that their songs, dances, and potions may someday be outmoded methods
shown in museums. Too bad! 

Perhaps Brian merely wants to soften the message (though ultimately it is
a message that cannot be softened, by its nature). Or perhaps he really
does believe that we should look only at cases we can at least imagine
how to repair --- in which case, sorry, he simply doesn't understand.

And so I agree with Fred Chamberlain. 

		Best and long long life to all,

			Thomas Donaldson


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