X-Message-Number: 15226 Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 07:26:56 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: comments: Perry and Plus HI again! Some comments on the current Cryonet. 1. Mike Perry suggests that he agrees with me on many points. If so, his agreement hasn't shown itself very well. We live in a world in which people must operate at a certain speed. If our preservation methods (whatever they be) cannot make people able to operate at that speed then they do not preserve. Moreover, the behavior of human brains (which inevitably must be coupled to a sensory system and another system which allows them to act) may violate Turing's ideas: not simply by being parallel, but by adding and subtracting new subcomputers (called neurons) and changing their circuitry too. It just isn't enough to produce a computer which can, at some very low speed, imitate some of the behavior of a human being. We need one which works at the same speed. I do not accept Turing's ideas as the last word on just how our computing circuits can work, not at all... and especially not because he envisioned a single computer working on an endless tape. Moreover, a realtime computer requires parallelism. Why? Because events needing our attention do not happily occur in sequence. WE may be working on a maths problem when suddenly a burning odor finds its way into our attention... and thus causes us to drop the math and take up that other problem. Yes, there is a sequence here, and the simple fact is that we are never aware of more than a single sequence (possibly the reason why sequential computers were so popular). The important question, though, is just how this event (remember how complex our perceptions are) found its way into our attention. Many different subcomputers (neurons) worked on both issues, and eventually the ones working on "burning" won out over those working on the math problem. It's been proven that we often begin action before we become aware of it; that sequential computer which forms part of our brain works on the hardest choices, and all the other parallel actions within our brain deal with smaller problems. 2. Mark Plus makes a good comment, one which certainly needs thinking about. As an explanation why some people fail to be interested in cryonics, there's probably something to the notion that they don't see themselves as different enough to merit preservation. As an argument that they should not be preserved, however (I'm not saying Mark believed this, but it is a natural conclusion) it suffers from a simple fault. Perhaps they became that way because they living in environments which we were fortunate enough to escape, or genes we again were fortunate enough to escape. Should they simply be abandoned for that reason, or should we think about how to get them to try cryonics? I have said before and will repeat here that I do not believe there is a common reason why many people refuse cryonics. There are many reasons, and it's not clear that they can really all be subsumed into one. Yet anything which stops someone from joining needs looking at, and this may be one thing which does that and so deserves our attention. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15226