X-Message-Number: 9045 Subject: Re: cloning vs. (?!?) cryonics Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 13:19:36 -0600 From: Will Dye <> In Message #9036, Marty Nemko <> wrote: >> Does signing up for cryonic suspension make any more or less sense now >> that it appears that human cloning will soon be possible? In Message #9037, Joseph J. Strout <> replied: > I think cloning has very little impact on the rationale for signing up > for cryonic suspension Joe is (as usual) quite correct about the medical problems regarding attaching an aged head to a new cloned body. On the positive side, I believe that there are some of benefits that the cloning issue brings to our side of the cryonics arguments. I'll outline two of them here: 1. A while back I recall a TV newsmagazine (I forget which) that was doing an article on cryosuspension. When the issue came up of "cloning" a new body for the suspended head, they showed some expert on cloning saying that cloning "just doesn't work that way". Here we are, just a few years later, and cloning DOES just work that way. That still doesn't mean we have overcome all the hurdles of neurosuspension, but that's not my point. My point is this: one of the main hurdles to acceptance of cryonics is that it's easy to find some expert in a current field of science that will express severe skepticism about cryonics, based on what they know about the current state of their field. This makes it sound like we're a bunch of dreamers who invoke "science", but actually don't know what they're taking about. The pro-cryonics response is often some variant of "don't judge feasibility by what is possible with EXISTING technology, judge it by what we can reasonably expect to be possible with FUTURE technology". Unfortunately for us, many experts just don't look that far ahead. So... what the cloning developments bring to us is this: it is a well-publicized, contemporary example of how one of the "expert opinion" objections to cryonics turned out to be flat wrong. We can then follow this up by saying most experts are expert in what we can do now and in the very near future, not in what we can eventually do; so you can't just take a given expert at their word, you have to look at the form of their argument: is there objection based on the known laws of physics, or is it based merely on what we currenly know how to do? 2. A second benefit that the cloning issue brings is that it adds to the general sense that technology is advancing quickly, and many things that were considered science fiction a few years ago became "off the shelf" within our lifetime. Waking up in a far-distant future where you are a complete stranger to everyone (and "everyone" may not even be what we consider "human") can be pretty intimidating to quite a few people. But waking up just a few decades from now, with many of your loved ones to greet you, is less onerous. Maybe it won't work out that way, but it's a nicer thought. Jim Halperin (as usual) does a good job in "The First Immortal" of waking someone up who has old friends and family in the world around him, as opposed to being more of a curiosity in a zoo. I think that there are other benfits, as well as some dangers, but I need to get back to work now.... --Will _________________________________________________________________________ William L. Dye \ "...it would seem that our Lord finds our \ desires not too strong, but too weak... We \ are far too easily pleased." --C. S. Lewis Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9045