X-Message-Number: 880
Date: 06 Jun 92 06:29:10 EDT
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: Micro/macro brain damage
Dear Cryolisters:
In response to Mr. Hale-Evans' call for opinions, I'm always
glad to offer a few. Of course they're off-the-cuff toss-em-out
opinions, as I don't know many answers in this matter.
I would tend to agree with the oil painting analogy in that I
think that damage that breaks things up into recognizable chunks
of a jigsaw puzzle is damage which is potentially repairable
under physical law as we understand it. Note that this is not
necessarily MACRO-damage; it might even be MICRO-damage, so long
as the weensy puzzle chunks stay chunky and identifiable. In
fact this micro-chunkization is probably what happens (I'm sorry
to say) in cryonics as presently practiced, and that is the basic
reason that we reasonable people <g> all recognize that cryonics
may entail a kind of repairable microdamage.
It is liquids, pretty clearly, that are the Great Entropic
Destroyer. In a liquid things that come apart get mixed, and in
an astonishingly short time after that you cannot infer (if there
is anything to the theory of quantum mechanics, at least)
ANYTHING about a solvated molecule or atom's _past_ history from
its _present_ position and momentum (even if you could measure
them both with precision-- ugly quantum problems there too). The
reason for that is that interactions of chemical things in
liquids are quantum events-- they are truly random in that
physicists believe that there is no predicting what will happen
on an individual scale. The essence of quantum theory is that on
a certain scale absolutely identical conditions will produce
wildly different results, and therefore on some level of
precision you cannot use NOW to predict THEN, or vice versa.
Resurrecting people from dust and gas, and perhaps even from
moderately advanced brain decomposition, would seem to require
that kind of precision.
Now, maybe quantum theory, despite making 11 digit accurate
predictions in some experiments and resisting all attempts to
overthrow it up till now, is grossly wrong. Maybe the reason one
U-238 atom decays now (say) while another waits until next week
and another a billion years from now, is that they (the three
seemingly identical atoms of the same isotope) are all actually
different in some as yet undiscovered way. Such supposed
differences, and a way to get a handle on them, are what you need
to make the universe Newtonian-Einsteinian again, and that's the
minimum kind of universe you have to have (I'll ignore chaos
theory here) in order to be able to build a computer that will
let you turn a crank to see the past. But now look: when you
have such a thing, don't forget to run the program forward to see
the inevitable future! And once you see it, including your own
future actions, don't forget to do what you're supposed to do.
Hmmm.
Whenever I get into paradoxes like this one, not to mention
that one about getting into a time machine and shooting your
parents before you are conceived, I take it as a clue that
there's something wrong with my premises. And whenever I hear of
a philosophy that requires that we discard perfectly good laws of
physics and "believe on" faster than light travel, or backwards
time travel, or getting around quantum mechanics-- well that's
how I know I'm looking at a religion. They don't call it the
Church of Venturism for nothing; there are dark hints that before
they let you into the priesthood you have to believe in universal
technological resurrection <sorry, Mike P., I couldn't resist
that>. I can't say for certain that any religion is bunk-- I can
only report when my own willing suspension of disbelief begins to
sag, as it does here. I personally put all this on par with the
bodaceous Jojo scheme whereby you pay money to have your coordi-
nates precisely measured so that when time machines are invented
in the future, Lazarus Long can come back and rescue you, along
with his mommy. Nope, at that point I really would sooner leave
the insurance policy to my loved ones.
If I can bring this back to the mundane, I think, like Ron,
that physical chunk-izing of the brain may not be such a lethal
thing, in and of itself. When Jackie Kennedy handed the surgeon
that hunk of brain she'd been saving there in Dallas, I think she
instinctively had basically the right idea-- her problem was only
with timing (i.e., she was a century or two early). The problem
with bullets to the brain, however, is frequently not so much the
macrodamage, but the terrible shock-waves within a skull that do
a lot of microdamage and stirring in liquids. And to add insult
to injury for a murder victim, there are (perhaps worse) the many
hours on the floor and in the back of hot coroner's vans, all of
which I suspect may make one forget many music lessons, even if
memory is holographic.
What can we do about all of this? We can't do anything about
the regrettable aim of crazy assassins, but perhaps we can do
other little things. We can get all of our members to take
vitamin E, so that their vital brain membranes don't break down
as fast (letting things stir) during warm ischemia (dietary
vitamin E makes a BIG difference in some brain trauma experiments
in animals). We might be able to make a deal with the coroner
whereby we provide a commercial ambulance at our expense to
transport our own members rapidly to his morgue cooler (if he's
worried about the chain of evidence, we can pay for a special
duty cop to go with, and stay away ourselves). We can keep
working on legal matters, and on membership and money, both of
which translate into political power, so that we don't have to
put up with the outrages that we put up with presently.
And, of course, I suppose we can all think a little harder
about what we'd want done for ourselves in such circumstances. I
don't have any answers for other people, and won't until we find
the physical basis of memory. Saul Kent says that if, after a
disaster, we can't find Saul Kent, we should find something that
MIGHT be Saul Kent, LABEL it "Saul Kent," and freeze THAT. I'm
not that optimistic, myself, but on the other hand, I don't know
where I should personally and rationally draw the line. Perhaps
if there is a recognizable brain to freeze (even in chunks), I'd
go for it (I believe that's what I have in my own Alcor instruc-
tions). If there's only goo, on the other hand, then *&%@ it.
Sometimes the universe just does that to you in the ultimate way,
say I: part of being an adult is recognizing it.
-- Steve Harris
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