X-Message-Number: 4418 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: CryoNet #4409 - #4412 Date: Thu, 18 May 1995 23:59:45 -0700 (PDT) Re Mr Leitl"s comments: 1. If you want a decent set of experiments and ideas on real long term memory, try Rose's book THE MAKING OF MEMORY. It's really hard to prove definitely for technical reasons, right now, but the suggestion is that our memories are preserved by multiplying connections between two neurons. As I said, that is still a theory. 2. One more uploader! Yes, I too would want to store myself (but would NOT want lots of copies running around alive and awake). Whether we can really do better than evolution with diamonds remains to be seen. When I mentioned the issue of repair, I was again referring to current ongoing work. NO, if we release the barriers to regrowth we will NOT produce cancers. We will have a way to repair brain injuries and injuries to the spinal cord. The most advanced work in this area is on repair of severed spinal nerves. These processes, as with salamanders, do not occur at random; they are touched off by an injury just as our own skin heals in response to injury. 3. I'm glad you're a biochemist. I am not, but a lot of the early ideas on repair (at least for me) which cryonicists were thinking and planning about BEFORE Drexler came on the scene actually were touched off by taking a speculative approach to biochemistry. (I will say that the biochemistry course books I've read, unlike some physics books, seem to forswear ANY speculation at all. It is a certain cast of mind). Right now, we are modifying the genes of viruses and getting two different kinds of virus to work as a team. This is just beginning to be done as a way to cure human disease, but by now it has a long history of work with lab animals. So let us speculate a bit: it's not hard to forsee a time when we won't just modify viruses but design them to suit our purposes. Yes, they will be machines, biochemical ones. And of course, several steps beyond that we can do the same with bacteria, and then single- celled creatures. Not only that, but a variety of different biochemical machines of this kind could be designed to work together to alter a damaged human brain. ... and we can go on from there. I will say that right now, in terms of our control over molecular events, our understanding of nanotechnology in this biological-biochemical line far exceeds what has yet been done with diamondoid structures or other such devices. I personally remember (I am by training a mathematician, and worked in a University before I moved back to the US) when I read my first book on biochemistry. I was not so interested in the metabolism of ATP so much as in the kinds of engineering we might someday produce and the devices (on the scale of molecules, viruses ... every one very small) we might someday design. And when seen as a collection of ideas which might be put together by ourselves and used for our own purposes, I found the subject wondrously rich. Even the notion of enzyme raises many ideas. And I still think that many cryonics patients will be repaired by such means, evolved much further than what we can do today. (That is a complex subject and others disagree with me; I am not really arguing that point here). If you get more interested in this viewpoint, I can provide some of the earlier writings on cryonics and how repair might be done. 3. OK, so the accidents with trucks etc. that you describe aren't clearly cases in which we can do SELF-repair (though I would not rule it out so easily). That still leaves to obvious alternative of others taking our damaged bodies and repairing them. If we can be revived from cryonic suspensions in which we were stored as heads alone, there is no reason to believe that a technology capable of that feat would be helpless when presented with someone damaged in an accident with a truck. Even now, evolution alone has made us surprisingly durable compared to most of the machines (including electronics) that we build. That durability isn't like that of the turtle, with a hard shell. It consists of abilities for self-repair after damage. (Note that if the shell is damaged the turtle has a hard problem, while people can recover from multiple fractures even now). I would expect that we can increase these abilities considerably, and then from there provide extra help by others when needed. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4418