X-Message-Number: 9277 Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 10:57:57 -0800 From: Tim Freeman <> Subject: Are they dead? (was: gust wondering) You did a good job of ignoring irrelevant conversations about Turing machines (which I am ashamed that I contributed to) and asked this good question: >if you can only freeze people when >they are dead how are you going to bring them back to life? What I mean >is do you think that we could ever find the cure to death? There are several different kinds of death. The kind that happens before the people are frozen is legal death, and the kind that would by definition be incurable is information-theoretic death. If the cryonics company can step in after legal death but before information-theoretic death, there is a chance for eventual revival. Legal death is a legal concept so it surely means different things in different jurisdictions, but in general it means that the attending physician observed various symptoms (probably including the absence of a heartbeat), decided that it wasn't worthwhile to try to revive the patient, and signed a form. The cryonics companies have to act after legal death to avoid being accused of homicide or assisting a suicide. Information-theoretic death means that the information that is the person (that is, the person's memories, personality, and skills) is gone. Once the brain has degenerated to the point that the information is no longer there, it is impossible to recover it. The decision that it isn't worthwhile to try to revive the patient is based on the available medical techniques and the doctor's judgement, so if the set of available medical techniques were not correctly understood, it might be possible to revive a legally dead person. Cryonics hopes to bring better medical techniques into play by freezing and waiting for them to be developed. -- Tim Freeman http://www.infoscreen.com/resume.html Web-centered Java, Perl, and C++ programming in Silicon Valley or offsite Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9277