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*crickets* Quasar. If you're going to rest on vague assertions and not even bother with more detailed research, then I'm rather surprised that you took the time to type that reply. What exactly were you hoping to achieve?
Well anyways, JJN, here is my reply:
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"Cryonics is a matter of belief, or conjecture, or speculation, on the future."
----------------Everyone makes predictions about the future. Not just so-called "futurists." Not just cryonicists. Everyone. When you decide to give up on someone and burn/bury her, you make a prediction that that person will never, ever be recoverable. The nice thing about cryonics is that it is more conservative, and does not make such a brash prediction.
I know that wasn't what you wanted to discuss, but I'm just pointing that out for other readers. This is why I go off-topic at times
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"If someone is told that more ideal preservation will likely lead to more retention of personal identity, this automatically implies that less ideal preservation will likely lead to loss of personal identity. And I think that this is a reasonable assumption. And, again, I think it is one of the more basic tenets of cryonics."
----------------I absolutely agree with everything you said, and I implied that earlier when I mentioned I support your 0 to 100% mentality.
But please read this Depressed Metabolism article on the media's interpretation of cryonics. Even though we both keep saying "suspended animation" it is simply conveying the wrong concept. There's just much more to cryonics, and this needs to be stressed alongside the effort to improve vitrification techniques, etc. Otherwise, we won't get anywhere.
The media keeps looking at cryonics in blanket statement terms, as if it will be the same for everyone.
We have to stress that it is an individual by individual basis (I'll go into detail below)
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"Please understand that I view myself as an ally of cryonics."
----------------Absolutely! In fact, I view you as a better ally of cryonics because you want to try to improve it... as opposed to, say, some folks who just sign up and forget about it. Or those who crack a cryonics joke, burp, and move on with their day. Nevertheless, we still have to do it correctly.
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"Whether or not cryonics can be, or even should be, more mainstream at this time....no conclusions about any degree of feasibility... " etc
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To be fair, anyone who is considering feasibility (in terms of the cryopreservation itself... not counting each individual's varying situation....
*cough*) has to ask himself: "Has someone else thought of this?" Cryonics has been around for four decades, and though Cold Filter sometimes goes off the deep end (haha), these people are adults and not children. In fact,
people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, and more have put their names to the statement: "There is a credible possibility that cryonics performed under the best conditions achievable today can preserve sufficient neurological information to permit eventual restoration of a person to full health." In contrast, a guy on the street corner with a serious case of "obsfucation, hyperbole, and flat-out misinformation" does not have a Scientists' Open Letter.
It's great that you (probably will) have the time to think about the "feasibility" of cryonics for yourself. However, there are people who are dying in nursing homes today. And as Aschwin noted above: "Expecting people to destroy their brains because suspended animation is not feasible yet is neither prudent nor caring." i.e. anyone who is flipping coins needs to pick up the pace
Now let me just explain why I linked to "Neural Archaeology" in my first post. When I was introduced to cryonics, I was more accustomed to some of the other justifications I usually see linked to. So when I read Donaldson's essay a while ago, I thought to myself: "This sounds like a load of crap." I mean, words like "no proof" and "unknown" quickly leap out to me like religious dogma. And that's because I kept viewing it from your perspective: this focusing of proper suspended animation as the central tenet. But now I realize that this is probably one of the best essays on cryonics.
There is a common misconception among my fellow college nerds that they "hopefully won't need cryonics"... as if everything in The Singularity is Near is just going to happen all fine and dandy. Though IEEE Spectrum's coverage of "The Singularity" back in June 2008 was rather amateur (Anissimov had an excellent response), it did contain a very wonderful ending quote by critic Richard Jones regarding MNT: "We shouldn't abandon all of the more radical goals of nanotechnology, because they may instead be achieved ultimately by routes quite different from (and longer than) those foreseen by the proponents of molecular nanotechnology. Perhaps we should thank Drexler for alerting us to the general possibilities of nanotechnology, while recognizing that
the trajectories of new technologies rarely run smoothly along the paths foreseen by their pioneers."
But I digress slightly. What I'm trying to get at is that here is this group of people who should be drooling all over cryonics, and yet they're not. They look at death as an independent entity that will just magically be overcome someday! In 2045! Donaldson's essay instead provided a better definition of death
as it pertains to each individual. And that is the central tenet you need to focus on. So please, re-read it. It may be written in 1987 and some things may be slightly out of date. But it's entirely relevant in your quest for central tenets.
Yet if you're going to continue to focus on suspended animation, then let me justify the use of cryonics today from another angle. I'll utilize a terrible example (I'm running low on "thinking juice." Sorry).
1. Al Gore cares about global warming, and he wants others to care about our future too.
2. Al Gore is behind Current.com
3. Max and Jason's "Still Up" is on Current.com. And Jason likes cryonics.
4. Maybe Al Gore should watch his own show, because...
5. CRYONICS WILL MAKE PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE. UGHGHHGHGGHHGHG
(No, I'm not interested in having a debate over global warming, haha. Again, it was a lame example)Over at Lesswrong.com, commenters sometimes treat cryonics like a flare-up of herpes; quickly hide it and move on. They deal in the abstract, and completely forget about cryonics in the real world.
Their wiki doesn't even mention anything about the social impact. And as I've stressed before regarding the "War on Aging," cryonics is tangible. Your loved one is in a dewar. So if we all supported this,
what on earth do you think would happen in society? I mean, it's not like cryonics exists in its own separate world.
This line of thinking isn't new, of course. Robert Ettinger said in the Prospect of Immortality:
"It has been fashionable for some time to say that 'complex problems do not have simple solutions'; this is a favorite excuse of lack-wit politicians. Nevertheless, the simple use of soap and water cuts a very wide swath across the complex problem of disease prevention, and the simple routine of formal courtesy does wonders in ameliorating complex problems of human relations. Likewise, I believe the freezer program will prove virtually a panacea, particularly in international relations - not because in itself it solves all problems, but because it provides time for the solution of problems." As I'll detail at my website, I think it would prove particularly relevant during the 21st century. More recently,
Bart Kosko wrote a piece on it last year for Edge, with the beginning line: "Society will change when the poor and middle class have easy access to cryonic suspension of their cognitive remains — even if the future technology involved ultimately fails." Apparently, everybody must have skimmed over it
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