X-Message-Number: 15461 Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2001 08:06:44 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: answers to 2 questions Hi everyone! The issue of Cryonet first on my list (I haven't been up on the Net or looked at cryonet for a while) has two questions: 1. Since I am still officially a member of the Board of INC, Ettinger wanted my opinion on the ionic method to assess viability. The first thing I'll have to say is that although I founded INC, and paid to get it set up as a corporation AND one to which you can donate in the US and pay no US taxes on the income you donate, I'm no longer involved in the discussions. I would value the ionic method for assessing viability because it does touch on a characteristic of our cell membranes which is quite necessary for viability. However if we can get actual operation of neurons: sending impulses and responding to them, then that's much more valuable and trumps any other method. This is a statement of what I think, independent of what research INC has been involved in. 2. Once more on neurons, brains, and computers: basically we do not have a situation in which we have some large subset of our neurons which connect totally to one another. Our connections take up only a subset of those possible. Just how big a subset and just which neurons connect to others has some commonality between us, but when we look at details we are all different. Anyone who reads PERIASTRON and thinks about what its articles say will know this. Moreover, our fine connections are not stable (recent discoveries verify this). That is why the number of possible connections is closer to 2^N and than N^2... though the number N here is hardly well known, as yet. Yes, at any instant Mike Perry or Thomas Donaldson will have a given set of connections between a given set of neurons, and less than N^2 of them, too ... but since our experiences will cause new connections and wipe out some older ones, this fact hardly seems important. If we wanted to make an instant copy of Mike Perry, for preservation, his exact set of connections WOULD become important, but only for that purpose. Once we revive him, his set of connections will start changing. The value of parallel computing here is that living in the real world we must do several different "mental" processes all at the same time. Not interleaving them, but really at the same time. Most of these are unconscious, but they're hardly less important because of that. I will mention breathing and heartbeat as two examples, but hardly a complete set. There are enough of each that we cannot really expect to work well with a single computer at all ... which does not mean we might not be able to THINK well, but instead that we could not SURVIVE well at all. I hope this point explains why I think numbers like N^2 mean very little if we want to find out how brains work and preserve them. As for parallel computing, even in computing, its value comes because it lets us do things which otherwise would take far too long ... in some cases, even now, things which would literally take millions of years, when done on a single fast sequential computer. And that's why I think Turing neglected timing, and timing is important enough that it should NOT be neglected. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15461