X-Message-Number: 8055 Date: Sat, 12 Apr 97 17:02:28 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Immortality Ben Best, #8042, wrote: >My bottom line is that (1) a focus on the far-future >is counterproductive to a focus on the near-future. I like to view the two as a harmonious whole. Although it's important to keep things in proper perspective at all times, *some* focus on the far future helps inspire me to a *better* and more productive focus on the near future. (As for the latter, I've made most of my living for the past 10 years at a cryonics facility--maintaining patients and other such work--which is a good setting for thinking out these issues.) It's also important to keep in mind that the "right" focus will not be the same for all people but differ with talent, interest and other characteristics. This is so even if your understanding of "right" is restricted to near-future concerns with no thought at all to anything more distant. For me, it is genuinely of interest to devote some focus to the far future. If that problem cannot be resolved, i.e. if I must experience eternal oblivion at some point, then arguably suicide could be justified right now. ("Look at the work it would save! And anything you 'gain' meanwhile is utterly ephemeral in the long run, of no consequence whatever to YOU--so go for it!") As it happens, I think immortality is, in some reasonable sense, inevitable, based on the information paradigm, randomizing universe, etc. The long-term advantage may well be guaranteed. (Though it takes some arguing, I've argued this in a chapter of the book I'm writing; and of course the idea is not new--Frank Tipler makes much the same point, as have others before him.) But the short-term advantage is not guaranteed, and that's where cryonics comes in-- you are better off to be frozen than trust your fate to the alternatives. Mike Perry http://www.alcor.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8055