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 ----- > 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 ----- > 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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2208