X-Message-Number: 23359 Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 08:38:10 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #23351 - #23357 HI everyone! Some further comments for Paul Wakfer and others: It's not that I LIKE my point about the distinction between cryonic suspension and suspended animation. I still hold to it because I think it's true. Some added comments: I would be the last to say that this issue is the only problem facing cryonics. It's easy to think of others. However I do think that the problem that the patient (who will be THEMSELVES, if they join up with cryonicists) will be "dead" does and will continue to occur. Cryonic suspension is by definition a last resort. It's what you do when no other choice is open to you. If you remain alive, then it will be tempting to believe that you will continue to remain alive. If you are alive but unconscious, your relatives, even if they're cryonicists, will be tempted to believe that you still have a chance at recovery. We may very well (and likely, I think) have suspended animation for cases in which the issue of death does not arise at all. Interstellar space travel provides a good example: even if you expect to live for hundreds of years, spending 50 years on a small starship with about as much space as you have on a First Class airline flight is bound to bore most people.... so they will want to sleep the whole of their journey. However, even if you're very sick, the hope of recovery will remain. And so it will continue until one day you "die", hardly deliberately, and so, if you've got your cryonics arrangements in place, you are put into cryonic suspension. Even now in many cases, especially with a cryonics team on hand, short term revival remains possible. The basic problem here is that we're taken over by the notion of "death" itself, and fondly believe that when push comes to shove, we'll manfully (or bravely, not to be sexist) decide for our suspended animation. I just said that short term revival often remains possible: in that sense, even now cryonic suspension is done on the "living". But thinking about this situation, and how many cryonicists will feel when they too become very ill, I think that the whole notion of death itself deserves some criticism both for its imprecision and its dependence on technology. Put ourselves forward several thousand years: we'll come to a time when anyone can be revived even if their brain and body have disappeared. Why? Because we always leave remains of many kinds, in the memory of our friends (and enemies!), the memory of those who were indifferent to us but still remember us for one occasion or another, what we have written or said publicly: not just those remains, but what can be inferred from such remains. Shall we then reconstruct such a lost person? Note that I said that (in my book of stories TALES OF SKASTOWE) a political, moral, scientific argument developed, not over the POSSIBILITY of reviving such people, but whether doing so would really be to their interest. Not whether they were "dead" or not, but whether they would benefit from revival. The particular story is called "Travelling", and tells the feelings of an American Indian who is revived from a few pieces of brain found in a swamp. He remembers only one thing, watching as his father speared a fish. But then he meets others, each of whom has grown so old that they have completely forgotten their first 100 years. Mike Perry had something to say on this; I don't agree with him completely, but do think that someday the entire notion of "death" will be considered superstitious and primitive. "Death" is not in the world, it is in our heads. So did this Indian benefit from his revival? Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23359