X-Message-Number: 30814 From: "Chris Manning" <> Subject: 'Why People Believe Weird Things' Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:04:04 +1000 I recently purchased a copy of the book 'Why People Believe Weird Things' by the well-known US skeptic Michael Shermer. He devotes about a page to a discussion of cryonic suspension. He writes in part: 'If cryonicists could succeed in reviving someone, the distinction between the living and the dead would blur. Life and death would become a continuum instead of the discrete states they have always been. Certainly, definitions of death would have to be rewritten.' Of course the distinction is already blurred, since death is a process rather than an event. I guess I won't get any argument about that here. Further on he discusses the fact that a person might be revived but without their memory or personal identity intact. He writes: 'If cryonic revival does not result in return of considerable personal memory and identity, then what's the point?' An interesting question. Would being restored to life with impaired memories, or no memories, still be desirable? Would I want to be revived without some or all of my memories? I think so but I'm not sure. I guess it would depend in part on whether it will be possible to ascertain the state of my memories prior to my revival. In 'The First Immortal' by James L. Halperin, terrorists break into the cryonic facility where the body of Alice Smith is stored and turn the temperature up. She is eventually revived from suspension but without her memories, so when she sees her son she doesn't recognise him. She is able to speak, because the scientists of that future era are able to implant a knowledge of language, and certain other things, into her brain artificially. After the situation is explained to her, she decides that in spite of having no memories of her former life, she is glad to have been revived. However, she regards herself as a different person, and mourns the death of her former self. ('The *real* Alice Smith, God rest her soul, was gone.') Further on, Shermer writes: 'Ubiquitous in the cryonics literature are reminders that the history of science and technology is replete with stories of misunderstood mavericks, surprise discoveries, and dogmatic closed-mindedness to revolutionary new ideas. The stories are all true, but cryonicists ignore all the revolutionary new ideas that were wrong.' I think he is right about that, although I think we could argue that some new ideas are more inherently plausible than others. Cryonics, while not achievable today, does not violate any fundamental laws of science, whereas perpetual motion machines do. Shermer goes on to discuss the theoretical possibility that cryonic suspension will become reversible due to nanotechnology. 'But theory and application are two different things, and a scientific conclusion cannot be based on what *might* be, no matter how logical it may seem or who endorses it. Until we have evidence, our judgment must remain, appropriately enough, suspended.' Well I think my reply here would be that we make many decisions in life based on taking a position where the standard of proof falls short of being 'scientific'. Cryonics is not a science but a 'protoscience' based on plausible expectations about the future capabilities of science. Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30814