X-Message-Number: 24184 Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 08:01:16 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #24179 - #24183 Hi everyone! A few comments on the Wednesday 2 June Cryonet: For David Stodolsky: I do not intend to defend "idea futures" --- among other problems, I would need a better idea of what they might be. However I will say that markets can (but hardly do) apply to everything. If two people, or a whole group of people, wish to bet on whether or not robots will equal the intelligence and mental abilities of humans by (say) 2050, they're free to do so. Some will make money on their bet, others will lose. Whatever means we might use to analyze the likelihood of such a bet are precisely those someone making such bets would use to do so. They aren't necessarily separate forms of activity. Naturally the person who has better ideas of how ideas will develop will win more such bets --- but then an understanding of probability helps ordinary betting too. And for games such as poker, played against human opponents, more than just probability is involved. For "Basie": For immortalists, there is a fundamental problem in transplantation of brains. This has never been done as a treatment for aging, even in rats or mice; however parts of brains have been transplanted. And guess what: transplanting a brain part from an older rat to a younger rat caused the recipient rat to age very rapidly until it became older. The problem is that in transplanting brains, you do not deal with aging of the brain itself, and changes in the hormonal output to the rest of the body which come from our lower brains (and those of rats, too). Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24184