X-Message-Number: 7346
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: some.comments
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1996 22:28:23 -0800 (PST)

Hi Everyone and Merry Christmas!

I've been very busy with other matters recently, but have just finished reading
the Cryonet messages.

About food and overpopulation, for Mr. Merel:

First of all, biotechnology is going very well indeed. It surprises me that 
Mr. Merel can't see this, when it is all around him if he will only look. It
is true that the older methods used in the Green Revolution probably can't
help, but that refers to outmoded means of creating new plant forms anyway.
Anyone who refuses to admit the existence of jetliners will no doubt wonder
just how our transportation system can manage so very many people.

Second, I will repeat what I said. People, even peasants (who in Asia now
are rapidly ceasing to be peasants and becoming middle class) do not go 
around producing children by some kind of automatic, uncontrollable process.
If necessary they will use infanticide if they decide they have too many. Just
as in the Western world, we can disturb that process by doing such things as
giving them unlimited food and other aid no matter how many children they 
produce: when we do so, WE are being irrational, not they.... though again,
I haven't read of any such process going on internationally. Mr. Merel's 
worries are much like those of someone who sees a truck bearing down on a 
turn in the road, and wonders whether or not the driver will be intelligent
enough to turn rather than run off the road.

Yes, there will no doubt be areas with starvation, and there are such areas
now. I think of Iraq and Africa, most prominently. The local governments have
done their best to screw things up there (with, in Iraq, a lot of Western
help!) and as expected they have screwed things up. While I'm sorry for the
victims involved, I can't get excited about whether or not something similar
will happen to us. Or Europe. Or most of Asia.

About SHUFFLEBRAIN:

I would be the last person to defend Pietsch's theory of memory, though at
the time he made it, when the whole issue of neural nets had been thoroughly
confused by prominent people such as Minsky, I can understand why such a 
theory had its attractions. It has no such attractions now.

However Pietsch also made some observations which still stick in my mind,
and which we as cryonicists should think about much more. After chopping up
the brains of his salamanders, and pasting them back into his victims'
skulls, Pietsch described something that still bears thinking on. The damn 
animals RECOVERED. Not only that, but belief among neuroscientists who study
such things has come more and more over to the idea that our own mammalian
brains have NOT lost such abilities so much as they are frustrated by other
neurohormones ie. we might with lots of work learn how to make human brains
do similar feats of repair. Not only did they recover, but there even signs
that they recovered some of their memories (not that salamanders are known
for their memory). 

This tells me that we might find some very interesting methods of repair
if this phenomenon were pursued experimentally further than before. And it
also raises a serious issue about just how much repair of ourselves our
brains might do, if treated in the proper way. At the least, if we learn how
to use whatever means for repair remain already in our brains, we may work
out much faster how to revive and repair suspendees than if we decide that
we will work out how to do the whole thing ourselves, with bio-/nano-tech
interventions.

Hmmm.

And finally, for Bob Ettinger:

We have a history, and I mean a biological history: a long sequence of 
natural selection has produced us. That will have affected, necessarily, how
we relate to other human beings, what we want, and how we do things; without
much more scrutiny of our biology, I doubt that ANYONE could produce any
ideas about basic morality which were more than just rearrangements of old
nostrums. That is why I brought this issue up.

Rather than ignore sociobiology, I strongly suggest that you learn a little
about it. You don't have to accept it, just learn about it... I make no 
claim that Wilson himself had the final word on any of it. And if you don't
watch out I'll buy you one his books myself and send it to you.

			Merry Christmas!
			  And long long life for everyone,

				Thomas Donaldson


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