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

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