X-Message-Number: 8866
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #8858 - #8863
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 01:37:16 -0800 (PST)

Hi again!

The trouble with any FIXED method for avoiding death, say for instance the
idea of storing copies of ourselves periodically, is that there will always be
something which might go wrong with it. (I'll leave it to the imagination one
could go wrong with the copies idea --- not that I think it takes much
imagination). 

If we aim for immortality then we'll have to be continually working out our
lifesaving technologies. I personally think that cryonics (in the sense
of storing people, with no commitment about exactly how it is to be done)
will play an important role for a long time to come. Not the only role, just
an important one. There will always be SOME way you could get badly messed 
up, so badly that at that time (whenever that time may be) nobody knows how
to fix you. So you should be stored until your problem is solved. And if we
can make copies, storing more than one copy would probably be done, too. And if
we need protections against copying going wrong, that too would be done ... on 
and on.

This is actually an OPTIMISTIC position. The possibility that we'll ever have
TOTAL control over ALL possible events which might kill or injure us, if you 
think a bit, is a chimaera. But constantly growing control is close to it.
By continually improving our lifesaving technology we are working towards our
immortality. If you insist that your probability of death must be soon 
brought to ZERO, you ask for an impossibility: but you CAN insist that the
probability continually decrease.

And finally: I hope to grow in many ways. Just what I will become after 100,000
years I do not now know. But I have no wish at all to bury my individuality in
some single mind. In terms of how we behave towards other people, I think
we will all grow up a bit: if you and someone else expect to be around hundreds
of years from now, that changes a lot how you will treat that someone else --
and he/she will treat you. Treat them well and someday they will repay you;
treat them badly and the same may happen. And so we will deal with one another
better than now. 

Immortality may actually give us a practical possibility of
a kind of anarchy --- one which has failed in the past, and would still 
fail now, because some men and groups decide that they can escape any 
retribution from others that they dominate. If both parties are immortal,
then late or soon that retribution will come -- and so the urge to form any
kind of government based on force will become less and less the longer we
live. This would not be perfect: what if such governments decided to kill 
people, and thus prevent that retribution? They would, of course, 
cause a reaction against them by others, who would not wish to deal with them
knowing their tendency toward murder. In the end I don't believe such groups
could last very long. Put in evolutionary terms, killing those you work with 
is not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Nor does this mean that everyone will like everyone else. But intelligence 
has a lot to do with how such dislikes work out, and with time we will all
become intelligent. (Some evolutionists have pointed out that compared to most
animal societies, human beings are LESS violent. There's something behind that:
if we study monkeys (in reality, not in zoos) fights can be fatal, and 
turned into human terms, we'd live in a society in which people constantly
murdered one another or killed others' children, and fights were constantly
breaking out). And humans also live much longer than most mammals already. 

But regardless, there is no need or drive to become one single mind. And if
we did, what would we do then? Decide to split again because we couldn't
stand one another? What advantage is there in it?

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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