X-Message-Number: 2208
From: whscad1!kqb (Kevin Q Brown +1 201 386 7344)
Subject: CRYONICS Neuro Debate

An interesting debate concerning the merits of neuropreservation
has arisen on the Extropians mailing list.  I have appended below,
with their permission, the two opening messages from Nick Szabo
and Perry Metzger.  Please do not conclude from these two messages
that the second message settled everything, because the debate has
continued onward on Extropians.  Nevertheless, I think that these
two "opening shots" point out an interesting concern with the
neuropreservation issue.
                              Kevin Q. Brown
                              INTERNET    
                                 or       
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> From att!gnu.ai.mit.edu!extropians-request Wed May  5 09:34:48 0700 1993
> From:  (Nick Szabo)
> Subject: LIFE-X: cryonics
> Date: Wed, 5 May 1993 09:34:48 -0700 (PDT)

Perry Metzger:
> The sort of infracellular repair required to fix the
> freezing damage makes producing a decerebrate clone and putting your
> brain in it, curing ageing, curing cancer, or any other similar
> problem look like a piece of cake by comparison.

There are significant biological arguments to be made against
going neuro.  The foremost may be the large amounts of 
information stored in the immune system, distributed around
the thymus, marrow, lymph glands, etc.  Along with this information
may be stored gigabytes of aquired structures controlling heat
balance, sensation, coordination, digestion, hormone balance, emotion, 
and perhaps even memory.  Given what we know about the form in which 
memory is stored in the brain (ie we don't), we can't even come close 
to ruling out aquired structures outside the brain, storing significant 
aspects or our personality.

Furthermore, we just can't say how hard curing cancer, aging,
or cloning a body will be.  Cloning a body in particular may
be exceedingly difficult since exercise, digestion, and
brain activity play a crucial role in the development of tissues,
but those activities create a new human being, not just body
parts.  On the other hand, freezing damage might
be repaired with, for example, neural growth factor hormones,
neural transplants, and designer enzymes combined with the
brain's own repair machinery, long before the era of cell
repair machines.

I'm not arguing against having the option of going neuro, just
pointing out that it's an extra layer of gambling added on to
this Pascal's Wager.

My major problem is with this line of argument in general:
"A *will* come before B".  One of the most damaging
liabilities of the space colonization movement has been long
range planning as ritual: the "next logical steps" of shuttle, then 
station, then moon base, then Mars, and So It Shall Be.  NASA
propaganda even features pictures of Shuttl,e SSF and Hubble next to 
Chesley Bonestell's depiction of Von Braun's shuttle, station, and
telescope, the caption wondering at how "prophetic" Von Braun had been!
Technology has changed greatly, but NASA and NSS still sing out of 
the hymnbook of Von Braun, oblivious to the continued massively expensive 
failure of that dogma.

Since cryonics is a direct competitor of religious rituals (burial
and cremation), there is a temptation to imbed cryonics with its
own forms of ritual and dogma.  All the more reason to take extra care
to keep questions of such speculative nature open, especially
the all-important questions of what will get cured or fixed
before what.

Nick Szabo					

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> From att!gnu.ai.mit.edu!extropians-request Wed May 05 13:13:34 0400 1993
> Subject: LIFE-X: cryonics 
> Date: Wed, 05 May 1993 13:13:34 -0400
> From: "Perry E. Metzger" <>

Nick Szabo says:
> 
> Perry Metzger:
> > The sort of infracellular repair required to fix the
> > freezing damage makes producing a decerebrate clone and putting your
> > brain in it, curing ageing, curing cancer, or any other similar
> > problem look like a piece of cake by comparison.
[...]
> Furthermore, we just can't say how hard curing cancer, aging,
> or cloning a body will be.

Yes we can. We can say that the difficulty cannot be harder than that
associated with fitting together neurons that were shattered like
glass and molecularly repairing the organelles and the like.

Consider that cancer is merely having tumors metastizing throughout
your body -- a technology that can repair individual cells can easily
identify cancer cells and individually destroy them.

Similary, ageing is, in some sense, merely the situation in which your
body's structure is not the same as it was when you were 20. Well, if
you can hack individual molecules, simply fix that.

I am NOT claiming the difficulty of these problems is not enormous. We
are talking about tasks that make the Manhattan project look like tic
tac toe. I am merely arguing that if you can do the one you can do the
other.

> On the other hand, freezing damage might
> be repaired with, for example, neural growth factor hormones,
> neural transplants, and designer enzymes combined with the
> brain's own repair machinery, long before the era of cell
> repair machines.

No, it cannot. Period. I'll bet $15,000 on the proposition that
nothing short of generalized cell repair machines will bring back
people frozen with today's technology. The damage is not impossible to
fix but it is sufficient that without being able to manipulate
individual cells you will get nothing but mush out the other end.
Brains that have most of their cell membranes ripped open are not
going to be fixed with designer enzymes, the brain's natural repair
machinery, or hormones. You won't even be able to get the patient's
circulatory system running sufficiently to do any of that work.

> My major problem is with this line of argument in general:
> "A *will* come before B".

If I can recoginize and fix arbitrary individual cells all the way
down to all the internal structural components, I *can* cure cancer.
The converse is, of course, not necessarily true.

I feel confident in making some such statements. Its hard to tell
which will come first -- strong AI or nanotechnology -- but its easy
to say that if you can shape aluminum you can make aluminum soda cans.
No one is PREDICTING here. Its merely a matter of "given that you can
do X, you can do Y". No one is claiming that X is necessarily a
prerequisite -- just that given it Y is possible.

Perry

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