X-Message-Number: 22507
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 12:54:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Dan Hitt <>
Subject: avoiding  mortality, idealism, unacceptable impositions (22485)

Hi Charles,

Thanks for posting message 22485 to cryonet. 

You listed 9 factors tending to cause high turnover in cryonics
personnel.  Of these i'd like to quibble a little with, or maybe just
question, #4 and #9.

#4 states ``Cryonicists obviously are driven by a strong desire to
avoid mortality''.  Perhaps from context you were just talking
about cryonics personnel?  But in any event, my sense is that many
posters here believe avoiding mortality is a strong driver
in the whole community.

But is this true?

Personally, i don't believe my desire to avoid death is 
much stronger or weaker than anybody i'm in contact with.

And perhaps it's just the nature of the written word which is my only
means of knowing about them, but i don't get the impression that big
contributors such as Saul Kent or Professor Ettinger are more
motivated by avoiding death than anybody else.  Is this really
what motivates them?  Is this what's motivating Mike D?  Is this
really what motivates most cryonicists?

You of course have much more direct observational knowledge from which
to make inferences, but it's hard for me to take as a given that
personally avoiding death is the big motivator which distinguishes
cryonicists from non-cryonicists.

It seems rather to me that a more reasonable motivation is that we
recognize and want to deal with a couple of real problems here: (A)
that society throws away people at the first sign that we don't right
at this very moment have a cheap, easy way of fixing them up, and (B)
that most people don't even see (A) as a problem.

I don't see this necessarily as idealism, except maybe in some weak,
generalized sense.  (This is your point #9, where you quote
Harrington's line ``Death is an imposition on the human race, and no
longer acceptable''.)

I think it's a matter of seeing that there's a bug here in society
(point (A) above) and some people are naturally motivated to fix bugs.
(Perhaps yet another reason why computer people get into cryonics?)

A person's contribution can be as simple as writing a bug report
(perhaps analogous to posting), to being a tester (analogous to
signing up), or maybe writing some code (analogous to being
an activist).

We can all help a little.

Does (e.g.) Perry Metzger have the same motivations for cryonics that
he has for NetBSD?

Somehow i'll bet he's just a problem solver.

Thanks again for your post.

dan

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