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

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