X-Message-Number: 9645 Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 08:45:02 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Reply to Saul Kent Hi everyone! This message is mainly to Saul. First of all, I apologize and retract (slightly) some of the things I have said about your opinions. I was reacting not to your essay itself (I got on the net after you had put it up on Cryonet, and began by hearing about it rather than getting the original) but to what various others thought you had said. At the same time, now that I have your essay itself, I must say that their misinterpretations are quite logical and justified. If our current product is so bad, just why should we still provide it? If cryonics has "failed" (whatever that may mean) then why should we promote it at all? For that matter, if it really has "failed", why should we bother to keep those now in suspension in suspension? It's failed, hasn't it? I do not intend to defend everything Ettinger has done since he wrote the PROSPECT, nor his response to your essay. However if I read your essay alone I would conclude that you never really under- stood what cryonics was about in the first place. What it is about is important and fundamental, and is not really affected by whether or not we can or cannot NOW have suspended animation. What the PROSPECT was saying, fundamentally, is that many medical ideas which are very firmly held, UP TO AND INCLUDING THE NOTION OF DEATH ITSELF, depend on assumptions and social practices which may very well change due to some future technology. Even now, anyone who would so blithely assert that present suspension patients cannot be revived due to the extent of damage they have suffered will say that based on common, firmly held beliefs which have NO scientific proof. How can we prove such a thing is impossible? The very most we can do is to say that WE do not know how to revive them. And at no time in the past, and no time in the future, will that WE ever understand all the conditions to which people might be subject to state of someone with condition X that they cannot be cured. WE must learn both patience and a sense of our limits, and come to understand that there are universes within universes that we do NOT understand. The justification for keeping people is suspension whom we do not now have even the vaguest idea for how to bring back to life comes directly from that understanding. They are not monuments or religious objects. They are patients which at present we do not know how to cure. And look here, Saul: suppose, as we both hope, that we CAN find ways to reversibly preserve brains. Both of us would choose that option over simple burial because we have the belief that once our brain can be kept in good condition, means will be found to restore us to bodies and good health. And if complete suspended restore us to bodies and good health. And when complete suspended animation arrives (as both of us hope, soon) then we both believe that restoring our aged bodies to youth and health will again become possible. I must point out that these beliefs put us in a crashing minority. For that matter, the entire idea of suspended animation for MEDICAL reasons depends on a belief that presently incurable conditions will someday become curable. And when we think carefully about that, it's plain that this involves assumptions most doctors would dispute. The problem is not with conditions for which research is now trying to find an answer, the problem is with those for which NO ONE NOW believes a cure is possible. Like, for instance, "death after 5 minutes" was believed incurable only 15 years ago. One side of this problem is that most "incurable conditions" are so poorly understood that no one can say just how long you would have to be stored until (if and when) a cure was found. Pick a time. There is no time at which more than a few people could benefit from a cure which everyone believed would come but just hadn't quite arrived just yet. That's how these things work. If you really want to use suspended animation for medical reasons, then you must accept that suspension must go on for an indefinite period into the future. And as I said before in a previous message, OF COURSE most authorities will oppose this idea. Cryonicists are telling them that they are wrong. And it will take a major turn in the cast of mind of anyone to realize that our present beliefs (medical and other) are only very poor approximations to those which people of the 21st Century, or the 22nd, or the 23rd will hold. Someday, I hope, people will learn their limits rather than make the al-inclusive claims so many make now, but that day may take centuries to come. (And naturally, with Authorities against it, most ordinary people will find it very hard to accept us, too). What do you really want from cryonics? I want my chance at immortality. But if you expect large numbers of people to flock to us, and measure the success of cryonics by the number of its adherents, then you will wait for a long long time. If you expect even most doctors to accept cryonics then you will be waiting for a long long time. I myself feel very glad that at last serious research has once more started, and was happy to pledge $1000 US to such research every year. But I felt glad not because I expected any flood of new cryonicists but because it would help my own drive for immortality (a belief that most people do not hold, and many would consider hubristic). So what do you want? And finally I must point out, not just for Saul but for everyone, that it would be the worst decision of all to decide on the basis of the scanty knowledge we now have, and will have, that because the brains of previous patients seem irretrievably messed up, that they should be thawed out and abandoned. No, I am not saying that you have said that directly, but once more there remains a logical implication. To take such an attitude is directly against that fundamental insight behind cryonics. We must be willing to store our patients into the indefinite future, for otherwise we may someday be ourselves the patients thawed out "because we now know their condition is incurable". AS for what cryonics now provides, it provides a POSSIBILITY of continued life. It is by research that we can make that possibility much larger for future patients (among which we may well be). Will cryonics ever "WORK"? Well, for individuals we will someday bring them back, and cure them of their condition. But there will aalways be those we do not know how to cure, who lie in suspension indefinitely waiting for some cure we now cannot even imagine. And I promise that those patients will seem, to some, good proof that cryonics has failed, and the lucky survivors will be thought of not as proof that cryonics has worked but as rare cases of purely random success. (After all, everyone knows how to cure condition X, but those others look quite impossible.... So clearly cryonics has been almost a total failure). Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9645