X-Message-Number: 30912
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: A review of Mike Darwin's UK lecture, part 1
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 21:53:09 -0700

Someone using the name "Kashmir" on ImmInst Forum writes:

http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=6938&view=findpost&p=255051


I am currently writing a review of Darwin's ExtroBritannia lecture. As a result 
of that lecture I'm considering becoming seriously involved in cryonics and 
possibly changing the direction in which that my life has been going. When 
Caliban inquires if "Mike Darwin is a sensitive subject he must have second 
sight for trouble, because in the two days since Darwin spoke I've discovered 
that he is probably the most feared and definitely the most hated man in 
cryonics. As an academic who has also been active in politics from council to 
national levels, I've never encountered anything like the hatred this man 
evokes. It is frightening. For these reasons I've chosen to re-register here and
protect my identity. In the pub after the lecture I thought Darwin was being a 
bit melodramatic when he advised one young chap "not to tell others in cryonics 
that you've talked to me." I don't think that anymore. 


Darwin spoke for a mesmerizing two hours. I don't know how long my review will 
be, but as it is, I'm only halfway through the first of what Darwin calls the 
"four eras" of cryonics. When I asked him how many times he had given this 
lecture in the US he threw his head back and roared with laughter saying, 
"****-me! Surely you jest; Bruno would have had a good time of it compared to 
what would be done to me. Don't you know that no man is a prophet in his own 
land?"




Review of Cryonics: Why it has failed, and possible ways to fix it - with Mike 
Darwin


Mike Darwin. Where to begin? I'd heard all kinds of things about him, from 
superlatives to condemnations. The last thing I heard was that he was a mentally
ill recluse, living in some isolated small town in California, or somewhere in 
the desert in the south-western US. I was pretty surprised to hear he was 
speaking here in London, and though I had plans for that Sunday, I decided to 
change them and go hear him speak. I didn't expect much. 


Was I ever mistaken! I was so fascinated, awestricken, actually, that I didn't 
think to discreetly hoist up my digital recorder on its lanyard and turn it on 
until had he'd been talking for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Darwin is the most 
compelling speaker I've ever heard, and I left the college shaken and 
questioning some of my most deeply held convictions about what is really 
important, and how I should live my life. If I had to use one word to describe 
my reaction it would be "shocked." When I approached him after the lecture he 
declined to give me a copy of his slides, but he did take my email and kindly 
sent along the plain text from many of the slides. It is from these, and from my
spotty recording, that I've composed the following summary and review.


I went to hear the talk thinking I was very well informed about cryonics, and I 
left realizing that most of what I thought I knew was wrong, a lie, or maybe 
more accurately, beside the point. He has the air of a caged lion about him and 
he started out by warning the audience that the topic at hand was something that
was intensely personal, even emotional for him, that his words and the 
accompanying images might be deeply disturbing, and that he "didn't suffer fools
gladly." I was ready to conclude he was daft when he said that "cryonics was 
the most important idea in the world today, one of the most "humane" ideas in 
all of history," and that we should understand he treated it with the respect 
those facts required! Then he let us have it: his first slide was of this kid 
kneeling next to a woman wrapped in aluminium foil and surrounded by slabs of 
dry ice. That, he announced, was a picture of him taken something like 40 years 
before when he was, I think he said, aged 16. It didn't seem possible since the 
man standing in front of us didn't look nearly old enough. I scarcely had time 
to ponder on this when his next slide came on. It showed his extended family 
gathered under a large tree with Darwin in his Mum's arms as a toddler, thumb in
his mouth. But that isn't what you notice at first; instead your attention is 
captured because most of the smiling people in the black and white photo have 
scarlet-red circle-slash symbols on their chests, over their hearts, actually. 


Darwin explains that all these people whom he had loved are now dead and that 
this has left him "wounded," and deeply distressed and angry, to this day. Above
the photo there was a quote by Mike Perry saying something to the effect that 
"no life is ever rightly ended." He then went on to show photographs of himself 
as a child freezing and vivisecting turtles and sending them drifting off into 
the clouds enclosed in what looked like a small biscuit tin attached to a 
cluster of helium-filled balloons. Trying to stop and start life and avoid 
death, as a child, was how he got interested in cryonics, not the other way 
around, he said. These pictures were phantasmagorical and I don't think it is 
because attitudes, or the culture, are so different in the UK from those in the 
US. Nobody has a childhood freezing and reviving animals, vivisecting them, and 
sending them sailing off into overcast skies, American or British.


Then he started the formal part of the lecture. Darwin sees cryonics as one of 
the great transforming ideas of history, on the same plane as the invention of 
agriculture, the industrial revolution, or evolutionary theory. He posits there 
are fundamentally two kinds of new ideas, incremental ideas that advance our 
technology and scientific understanding gradually, and blockbuster ideas which 
he calls "paradigm changing" that overturn the whole social structure from 
morals through commerce. This is the point where my recording of his speech 
picks up and I've listened to it several times since Sunday. He uses examples 
like the Copernican system as opposed to the Ptolemaic, earth-centred view of 
the solar system, and germ theory as opposed to Vitalism. He argues that there 
are two ways such revolutionary ideas are successfully promulgated, principally 
by what he terms "seduction," wherein the populous and the powers that be don't 
understand that the new idea will destroy their most important cultural values 
and entirely transform their civilization. Instead, they are "seduced" by the 
"irresistible advantages" whilst being blind to, or ignorant of, the powerful 
transforming or damaging effects of the new idea or technology. As an example he
presented the argument that agriculture has resulted not only in civilization 
and a huge increase in the number of humans, but that it has also caused a 
mind-numbing increase in suffering and a halving of the average life span. He 
noted that this has gone on for 10,000 years, with the return of the average 
global human life span to its pre-agricultural level only having happened as 
recently as around the time he was born. He advanced the same argument for the 
Industrial Revolution and the introduction of TV, which he termed "pernicious," 
and described as destroying everything from a proper attention-span to communal 
family meals. 


The second route to introducing these so-called paradigm changing ideas is by 
what he terms "insurgency," a more or less militaristic attack on the "hard 
core" of the existing order. He relies heavily on the theorizing of the 
philosopher of mathematics and science, Imre Lakatos, who rejected the idea of 
mathematics and science as a patient accumulation of ever more complex truth, in
favour of a model wherein advances occur as a result of dramatic proofs and 
refutations. When I spoke with him after the talk, and enquired about how he had
come across Lakatos' ideas, (I'm a career scientist and a student of theories 
of knowledge) he laughed and said that, like Marx, he had been spending an 
inordinate amount of time in the British library (sic) "trying to find the 
intellectual foundation for things I've long observed to be true, but didn't 
know the proper names by which to call them. "


Lakatos proposed a model of scientific advance wherein there is a "hard core" of
scientific or mathematical theory which is surrounded by a "protective belt" of
gentle inquiry. It is work going on within this protective belt that 
incrementally advances or erodes the hard core of the paradigm. Darwin argues 
that virtually all of normal scientific research and institutional science 
operates in the zone of this protective belt, and that revolutionary, or 
paradigm changing ideas, penetrate the protective belt, smash the hard core, and
thus demolish the whole structure. Whilst he was speaking I couldn't help 
thinking that the image he used in his slides of two concentric shells being 
exploded by paradigm changing ideas was really more akin to the smashing of the 
atom, and with similar results; the release of a vast amount of disruptive 
energy which could be used for good or ill.


The thrust of his argument is that cryonics, like Natural Selection, or the 
theories of General and Special Relativity, are core-smashing in character, and 
that in the case of cryonics the idea is so antithetical to the existing order 
of civilisation that it can it only be advanced by insurgent means. I sat 
transfixed as he elaborated the ways in which cryonics is "profoundly disruptive
of the hard core of civilization. "

Text from his slides:

. Overturns the Vitalistic view of life

. Challenges the conventional definition of death

. Invalidates the core tenets of contemporary medicine

. Erodes the need for a mystical afterlife


. Radically redistributes capital and disrupts inheritance, bequests, and 
mortuary customs

. Mandates a complete change in reproduction

. Perturbs generational succession

. Requires Space Colonization


. Requires (and supports) profoundly disruptive technologies such as cloning, 
regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence

. Ends the species and Enables Transhumanism


Whilst I found these ideas a bit exhilarating, his next list of "atom smashers" 
was more personal and disturbing. These were things I had never thought of 
before, and that made me understand, for the first time, why cryonics has been 
so hard not only for society to accept, but for my own family and friends. 
Darwin argues that cryonics:

. Creates Survivorship Guilt. 


. Indefinitely extends anxiety and uncertainty accompanying life-threatening 
illness. 


. Prevents the psychological closure that accompanies "true" death with 
disposition of remains. 


. Creates indefinite anxiety about the well being of cryopreserved loved ones. 
Disrupts the intimacy of family interactions during the "dying" process. 


. May bitterly divide family members who are opposed to cryonics versus those 
who are in favour. 


. Blocks deeply held mechanisms for coping with death and bereavement that are 
inculcated from childhood by eliminating the customary wake, funeral, and other 
comforting rituals.

[continued in next message]
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