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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8866