X-Message-Number: 10485 Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 09:47:18 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10476 - #10484 To George Smith (again): The issue with cryonics is that most people declared "dead" simply are NOT dead. To decide to go along with current popular beliefs and call them "dead" has about as much sense as someone 400 years ago deciding that even though the Earth orbits the Sun we should say that the Sun orbits the Earth because that is the popular view. (It has even less sense, actually, because in some countries you'd be imprisoned if you claimed that, while no one will imprison us for claiming that cryonics patients are not dead). I am not trying to be obscure. Nor do I claim that cryonicists believe that NO ONE can die. You die if enough of your brain is destroyed that no future technology can ever bring you back: which happens with victims of Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, a large number of more obscure medical conditions, severe strokes, and brain tumors. You also die if you are cremated, either deliberately or in an airplane crash. You die if you rot away into a skeleton. But so long as your brain remains, even if damaged, then the possibility that some future technology may work out how to revive you also remains. Nor is it true that we believe that we will someday "revive the dead". WE hope to someday find out how to mend badly damaged people who have been kept from further deterioration by cryonic suspension. In the end, some of these we'll know how to mend, some we will not (at any given time). And yes, we may find that some people have suffered so much destruction of their brain that they have died. But even then, cryonics patients are NOT is some magical in-between state. Their true condition is unknown, and we keep them in suspension until it becomes known. This is actually something with lots of precedent: accident victims are cared for until it's clear that nothing can bring them back, for instance. People are put on respirators and given special blood solutions and drugs, because they are not yet considered "dead". The major difference is simply that our definition of "dead" differs from the popular one. And our definition is clearly better. I am old enough to remember when someone was declared "dead" if they stopped breathing and their heart stopped beating. Then artificial resuscitation was rediscovered (there was actually a period in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries when doctors also tried to resuscitate people). Then we were authoritatively told that no one could be brought back after 5 minutes at room temperature --- whereupon scientists have now pushed that limit back to more than 10 minutes. It seems to me that "dead" should be an absolute state, so that if someone is declared "dead" we really know that nothing can be done for them. Currently that's simply false. We should NOT be shy of saying that common opinions are WRONG. If we are so shy, then just what we are doing becomes mysterious and possibly blasphemous. That is hardly the best way to explain ourselves to someone new. For that matter, it's also a way to shove ourselves into a religious mode, so that some people will think that they must not become cryonicists because doing so would offend their god(s). We have different beliefs, which we will defend, on when and whether patients are "dead" in the first place, and we are acting on those beliefs. It takes a very strange god, indeed, who would so frequently change his mind over whether somone is "dead", as frequently as we've seen our ability to revive people to increase. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10485