X-Message-Number: 19766 Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 14:04:58 -0700 Subject: Odds and Ouroboros From: Peter Merel <> I'm not used to wearing jewellery. I never wore so much as a ring or a watch before fastening the Alcor bracelet last week. So I'm not used to it yet. It bugs me. It begs my attention when more pressing matters should. It's an ugly ring of sliding steel that jangles and wriggles and troubles my sleep. But it has had an unexpected benefit. The odds of survival, or the validity of assigning odds, or the proper parameterization of the odds, or the rationality of taking cryonics as a wager or Pascal's wager or betting on the Preakness - really, none of these have anything to do with why someone signs up for cryonics. We don't sign up to obtain some percentage of certainty of survival. No, we sign up to 100% eliminate the certainty of death. I walked down Coronado beach yesterday, Ouroboros dragging at my wrist, watching the scurrying tourists disporting in shallow brown surf. I wouldn't want to swim in there. It's cold kelp and kiddie pee water. I'll wait until the peaches and paste faces go home in Autumn, and the water turns warm and clean, and the beach is shining and empty. After all, I live here. And Ouroboros means I no longer know how long I'll live here. I might get sucked down into the blue deep and not found for days. More likely I'll get squished like a bug on the freeway. Or one of a million other ways to die permanent, the same as anyone on that beach. But also I might not. Unlike all the short-lived suckers basting on the strand, I might live a thousand years. Or longer. Ouroboros means death is no longer certain at all. I suddenly realized that I really, really like that. So it looks to everyone else like I have this lumpy chain around my wrist. But thinking of it as a distinction containing the certainty of death, I'm on the open side of it. Life is uncertainty - and that's what we pay for by signing up for cryonics. Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19766