X-Message-Number: 9558
From: Ettinger <>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 23:37:19 EDT
Subject: Simulated Deterioration

SIMULATED DETERIORATION

That "failure of nerve or imagination" of which A.C. Clarke spoke--and which
he himself displays--still afflicts most people, even many of those in
cryonics. Mike Darwin--formerly a leader in cryonics, and still active in
related fields--now believes that even the best of current methods (his)
leaves the patient (victim?) only a frozen corpse. Current leaders of some
organizations want to put almost total emphasis on research, very little on
recruitment. This seems to me badly out of balance.

First, there are at least six things on which most of us ought to be able to
agree, even if our emphases differ:

1. If we had fully perfected suspended animation, then a patient in biostasis
would only have to wait for a cure for senility or other fatal ailment, and
not for the much more difficult cure for freezing damage etc. Achieving this
would also greatly change the climate of opinion.

2. If you have the ability and willingness to pay, you should choose what you
believe to be the best available procedure--even if the degree of superiority
isn't clear.

3. Almost any kind of biostasis--cryogenic freezing, non-cryogenic freezing,
vitrification, freeze-drying, chemical fixation, whatever--will preserve more
structure and information than would be preserved in the grave, hence offer a
better chance of rescue.

4.  If your organization is unable to keep you in biostasis--if e.g. it goes
bankrupt--then the method of biostasis will not matter.

5. If you cannot afford any of the procedures offered, or if you are talked
out of it, then you have lost any chance you might have had. (And if you are
the one talking somebody out of it, then you have lost him or his relative any
chance he might have had, as well as any contribution he might have made to
the strength of the organization.)

6. Cryonics organizations must be very careful about what they appear to
promise, for fear of lawsuits as well as for fear of misleading the naïve to
their later regret.

That said, my main aim today is to offer a slightly different slant on the
unappreciated power of inference, including one tactic I have not seen
mentioned before. 

Leading up to this, I remind readers that shredding and crumpling paper does
not destroy the information printed on it, any more than the information is
destroyed by taking apart a jig saw puzzle and mixing up the pieces. 

Of course, a puzzle in three dimensions, with many orders of magnitude more
parts, and pieces that at some levels are not rigid, and constituting a
picture we currently could not even recognize, is a different story. If you
were (somehow) to homogenize a brain so thoroughly that each kind of atom 
would be equally likely to be found in any randomly selected volume, then the
individual has been destroyed (whether or not capable of reconstitution by any
means). But this does not happen, and we are in fact dealing simply with
varying degrees of practical difficulty.

Most people are simply incapable of the small leap of imagination required to
foresee enormous increases in the capabilities of future technology. John
Campbell, late editor of ASTOUNDING (ANALOG) magazine, told me he just could
not imagine any technology capable of repairing a body in which every cell had
been burst by freezing. (But he was capable of believing in Dianetics!) Aside
from the fact that cells don't burst, repairing every important cell (or even
every important molecule) is looking more and more feasible. (A moon rocket
with three million separate parts and costing billions of dollars was
previously unimaginable to many people for essentially the same reasons.)  

Elsewhere (e.g. on our web site) I and others have indicated some of the
direct and indirect means at our disposal to infer information about the
frozen brain. Here's another--possibly a little different from the tactics
suggested by Drexler, Merkle, and others :

With computing power several orders of magnitude beyond ours, and substantial
gains in other fields, we could simulate the deterioration of cryosuspended
brains under an enormous variety of conditions and from an enormous number of
starting points. Then the nanobots investigating the patient could just report
what they found to the master computer. (Nothing new so far.) But now the
master computer, instead of trying to work backwards from effect to cause by
brute force or by other methods previously discussed, would just compare what
was found to its humongous store of simulated sequences of deterioration,
naturally with the focus on key regions of the brain. The closest match night
be good enough, or at least it would offer a much more advantageous starting
point for putting the jigsaw puzzle together.

In Israel there is a saying: "If you don't believe in miracles, you are not a
realist." Arthur Clarke, before he got old and tired, said (roughly): "The
achievements of future technology will be not only greater than we imagine,
but greater than we can imagine."

It isn't hard to imagine the aforesaid nanobots and computers. Their
precursors are already at work or on the drawing boards, their principles well
understood. Nerve and imagination, time and motivation--that's what it takes.
This is not "faith" and it is not the total sum of wisdom; it is an informed
view of reality and it is just one element of a rational life plan.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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