I have no idea if this is a sensitive question (like every second cryonics question seems to be) and apologies if it is....
but I was wondering what Mike Darwin is doing these days?
Posted 24 June 2005 - 10:38 PM
Posted 24 June 2005 - 11:31 PM
Posted 13 July 2008 - 12:58 AM
The last I heard, Mike lives in a cabin on an Indian reservation in Arizona and has conversations with himself about some ring.
Posted 13 July 2008 - 09:35 PM
Posted 16 July 2008 - 06:26 PM
Posted 04 August 2008 - 08:17 PM
Posted 04 August 2008 - 09:40 PM
He explained that he had become convinced that the only way cryonics and, for that matter, Transhumanism, could succeed was by a relentless insurgency, and that notions that cryonics was just an extension of medicine and was compatible with religion and existing social and political institutions, while superficially satisfying, were both mistaken and bound to fail. (When we spoke afterwards he arched an eyebrow as he said, "These approaches are useful as tools or pabulum. They delay understanding by the culture that we represent its destruction, indeed that we represent the destruction of the human species and its replacement with us, which is unquestionably the most horrible thing imaginable; if they could imagine it, which thankfully, they can't. Not yet, anyway!")
Posted 04 August 2008 - 10:31 PM
He explained that he had become convinced that the only way cryonics and, for that matter, Transhumanism, could succeed was by a relentless insurgency, and that notions that cryonics was just an extension of medicine and was compatible with religion and existing social and political institutions, while superficially satisfying, were both mistaken and bound to fail. (When we spoke afterwards he arched an eyebrow as he said, "These approaches are useful as tools or pabulum. They delay understanding by the culture that we represent its destruction, indeed that we represent the destruction of the human species and its replacement with us, which is unquestionably the most horrible thing imaginable; if they could imagine it, which thankfully, they can't. Not yet, anyway!")
I've noticed a trend in cryonics lately that sounds like the loss of nerve Darwin indicates here. One cryonics organization even changed the name of its magazine because its leaders want to distance cryonics from the I-word, despite the title of cryonics' foundational text.
Edited by xlifex, 04 August 2008 - 10:32 PM.
Posted 04 August 2008 - 11:31 PM
Mike Darwin is usually right about the state of cryonics, but on this point he still seems to suffer unduly from the "Ayn Rand Disease", which dictates that a sensible idea needs to be part of a larger, more grandiose philosophy, to succeed. Presenting cryonics as "just medicine" may reduce the drama, but it keeps cryonics straight.
It should be amply clear by now that the immortal superman represents not just a goal, but a way of life, a world-view only partly compatible with today's dominant ideologies. We might call this fresh outlook the new meliorism, of which the cryonics or people-freezing program is an important current element.
The old meliorism, it will be recalled, flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it maintained the optimistic view that indefinitely sustained progress is possible by human effort, especially through science and technology; it is the traditional American outlook. However, it focused primarily on social rather than biological change and many of its goals proved elusive in the short run, In the twentieth century the bewildering zig-zags in science and the piling up of calamities produced a psychological backlash and the rise of dark and gloomy philosophies such as existentialism.
Nevertheless, I believe the meliorists were essentially correct, and wrong only in their emphases and time scales.
The new meliorism will shift the emphasis away from the herd and social change, toward the individual and biological change, and it will entail more subtlety, wariness, and scope, while retaining the basic elements of optimism and scientific orientation.
Posted 05 August 2008 - 02:49 AM
Posted 05 August 2008 - 11:56 PM
Posted 06 August 2008 - 01:16 AM
Posted 06 August 2008 - 02:25 AM
Posted 06 August 2008 - 02:56 AM
Posted 06 August 2008 - 03:11 AM
The main problem is that cryonics can not be a paradigm shift until a mammal has successfully been brought back from storage at cryogenic temperatures and that normal looking brain activity has been demonstrated.
Posted 06 August 2008 - 03:14 AM
Posted 06 August 2008 - 03:24 AM
It would make a great difference because it shows the continuance of one's sentience--cloning does not do that, and is in no way comparable to what cryonics could do.
Posted 06 August 2008 - 05:54 AM
Suspended animation is not cryonics. The paradigm shift of cryonics is something different. It is a paradigm shift that could happen before suspended animation is perfected, or perhaps not even after suspended animation is perfected. The key idea of cryonics-- the paradigm shift of cryonics --is the idea that patients should continue to be cared for even if they are beyond recovery by contemporary means. It's the idea that almost everything that medicine calls "death" in a particular era is destined to become a treatable pathology in a later era. That is an idea that transcends suspended animation, and that is so far from normal social mores that it may never be accepted by the mainstream whether there is suspended animation or not. It is a paradigm shift that requires overturning the idea of closure, which is a deeply uncomfortable proposition for most people regardless of demonstrated technology.The main problem is that cryonics can not be a paradigm shift until a mammal has successfully been brought back from storage at cryogenic temperatures and that normal looking brain activity has been demonstrated.
We would all like "proof" that cryonics will work. There will never be proof that cryonics will work. Certainly, individual people will be revived. Some of them (we hope a very large percentage) will actually come back as the same people as those who "died." There will certainly be proof that we can successfully freeze human brains and definitively preserve personality, identity, the "soul", or what have you. But those things aren't cryonics, they're just particular technologies. They don't really embody the key idea.
The really key idea in cryonics is the idea of freezing (or otherwise preserving) people when we don't know if we can ever revive them. Of course, we intend to figure out later whether we can do this. We intend to succeed in reviving them. But before we've actually done so, we certainly can't prove we will succeed. And funny thing, after we've done so, the proof will be irrelevant. If we know how to bring somebody back as a fully functioning human being after an hour of ischemia, why should we ever bother to go to the added expense and trouble of freezing them first? That would be bizarre and unnecessary.
If you're involved in cryonics, you've got to make your peace with the unknown, because it will always be there. You've simply got to make your peace with it.
Posted 06 August 2008 - 02:19 PM
Posted 06 August 2008 - 06:01 PM
If you're involved in cryonics, you've got to make your peace with the unknown, because it will always be there. You've simply got to make your peace with it.
Posted 07 August 2008 - 12:03 AM
I have a few questions which may have been explored within this thread, but I was not able to parse them out.
1. Was Mike's talk, however entertaining, actually providing concrete facts or was his talk presenting suppositions?
2. In ways could Mike's talk affect cryonics positively?
3. What was the (bottomline) purpose of Mike's talk?
Many thanks,
Natasha
I've just come from spending the better part of the day with Mike Darwin and two of his mates. We unexpectedly encountered each other at a lunch-hour recital, and I was invited to join them for an early supper, and after that, for a few pints at pub they fancy in Soho. I mention this because it is clear that Mike's talk was just the tip of the iceberg, and that he has many solid ideas, or at least well developed ones, with regard to repairing cryonics and transforming Transhumanism. It is also apparent, from remarks made here and elsewhere, that my first review installment was mistaken for a review of the talk in its entirety. The second part of my review is below, and you should keep in mind that I would guess I'm still only three quarters of the way through what Mike terms the "first era" in cryonics. There were three more eras that he spoke on, a half-hour questions period, plus several hours of subsequent discussion at The Helping Hand pub. There should be a lot more to come.
Review of Cryonics: Why it has failed, and possible ways to fix it - with Mike Darwin, Second Part
Darwin then made some closing remarks about the issue of what he subsequently referred to at the pub as "future squatters." I asked if he'd mind if I recorded his conversation, and he consented. Here is an edited transcript of his remarks: "Future squatters are people who believe that technological advances will happen when conditions are right for them to occur. This is a brilliant position, because it is never wrong; it is the perfect piece of circular reasoning that justifies doing nothing. My years in exile in the desert caused me to realize that the problem now being encountered in cryonics is not so much that intelligent and talented people find it impossible to believe that cryonics, vast extension of the human life span, or, for that matter, many of the transformational technologies of Transhumanism are impossible, but rather that they that find these things not only believable, but inevitable within their lifetimes as well as certainties for them."
He said that it was his perception that most people in the Transhumanist and cryonics community believed that "history has an inevitable trajectory and that it is configured to benefit them personally. What kind of ignoramus could believe such crap? Even glancing contact with history should cause the thickest dullard to realize that while the historical trend has been towards progress, the total time spent by the average member of species under good conditions has been miniscule, compared to time spent under what can only be characterized as truly terrible conditions. What's more, long periods of darkness and misery have occurred between ages of progress, and without any question, the majority of humans who have ever lived, or who are living now, have no prospect of benefiting from technological progress, and arguably have suffered greatly because of it... They sure as hell aren't going to get biological immortality any time soon, if ever.
...This peculiar perspective on history is an artefact and a tragedy of modern, politically correct, and so-called sensitive, emasculating education... and also part of the high price paid for abandoning solid, classical education. No man, unless he is an idiot, can have learned the works of Tacitus and Cicero, or been schooled in the ups and downs of Western civilization since antiquity, and believe such nonsense. ... Any proper understanding of history also entails an understanding of the fallacy of the black swan; the past is not a certain guide to the future, no matter how long the trend or baseline. Almost all swans are white; almost. But you are doomed if you've bet your life on that proposition and a black one turns up. And there are, most assuredly, black swans. The black swan problem converges on certainty when you begin to deal with very long spans of time, which, by their very natures, cryonics and Transhumanism must do. A wonderful analysis of the black swan problem is Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Look it up on Google, and then buy it, and read it.
...It gradually dawned on me that future squatters were not only wrong, but ignorant and evil as well. This led me to realize that the core problem was the absence of a philosophical and moral basis for cryonics and the accompanying ethics and dogma required to enforce it. These future squatters are not merely parasites content to sit and wait until robots show up at their doors with immortality on a silver platter, all too often they are actively contemptuous and dismissive of the people who are working their butts off trying to survive...
...I believe Mike Perry has created an absolutely critical philosophical foundation for Transhumanism. In many ways it is the Das Kapital of Immortalism. It is a good foundation to build upon, and I think it will be built upon. Many years ago, when I was just a boy, Curtis Henderson, the president of the Cryonics Society of New York, told me that the "Russian Revolution consisted of two men, a dog and a printing press." Well, he wasn't far off the mark. It was more like 30 men, a lot of printing presses, and there were probably more than two dogs (there are dogs everywhere in Russia today, and they follow you around looking for an owner). ...Consider that 30 men took a country of pious peasants and foisted a totally alien, atheist ideology on them, led them through arguably the most brutal war in history, the Great Patriotic War, and then led them to be, first among all men for all time, the members of our species who first stepped into the cosmos. If you consider this bit of history in that light, cryonics seems easy by comparison.
...Oh yeah, don't forget the dogs, they contributed too; one of them suffocated in orbit as the price for being the first animal in space, and I'm sure the others played important roles, as well."
The next problem Darwin talked about was what he described as the "lack of professionalization" of cryonics. He stated that all technological endeavors create professionals and standards, this so that they can function harmoniously internally, whilst also providing consistent service to the public in a way that makes it possible for the public to distinguish the character of various practitioners and their associated enterprises, such as charlatans in medicine, qualified builders and plumbers, and so on. He added that the defining feature of professionalism is that it creates "professional memory or heritage" and fosters "institutional memory" in enterprises engaged in its practice. In the absence of professionalism, he stated, two problems occur:
· Empowerment of amateurs and laypersons, usually "outsider" personalities, often with accompanying deficits in social and emotional intelligence.
· Attraction of dysfunctional and sometimes sociopathic personalities as members (and sometimes as activists).
It seems apropos here to speak of something he mentioned later during his talk, which he said he thought was very important, and that he wished he had understood earlier in his career in cryonics. I'll summarize from the recording: When he was in Russia he said that he had been there for a day or two when someone at a meeting began to speak excitedly in Russian, provoking amusement all round. The gist of these remarks was that it had been determined he was "adequate," and that this had caused surprise and amusement at the meeting. It was explained to him that the Russians have two words by which they classify people, words that have no equivalent in English, and that most closely translate as "adequate" and "inadequate."
The word "inadequate" is not about sanity in opposition to lunacy, or competence as opposed to incompetence. Significantly, it describes a person who may be competent, successful, even a respected professional, but who lacks realism, or commonsense reasoning about the world. This person is not necessarily a "geek or a nerd" but has a vigorous impractical streak that is damaging to effective action and that tries relentlessly to shift focus from necessary tasks, such as, say, in lieu of doing a business plan, to instead solve all the problem of cryonics by persuading the NHS it is essential lifesaving medical technology, and thus must be made available to all. This kind of person must be quickly identified, contained, and in some cases excised. In no account should they ever be allowed into any position of responsibility. The gist of what he said was that this was a dangerous kind of mental disorder in the context of cryonics, and persons labeled as such should be dealt with, ever after, in the same fashion used for other kinds of crazy people. The excitement and laughter from the Russians Darwin was visiting was, he said, an expression of "surprise and relief that I was not "inadequate," since many of the people who try to get involved in cryonics in Russia, as is the situation everywhere else in the world, are "inadequate," or worse.
On a topic related to this, he noted that excessive optimism and "temporal load shifting" had caused cryonics organizations to consistently fail to consider necessary safety margins, and, where, this had been done, to reverse course. His next slide was titled: "Why No Reserve Factor????" and had the accompanying quote: "A surprisingly consistent failure in the application of new technologies is the failure to consider the required margin of safety or reserve factor. Each new technology seems to dazzle its practitioners blinding them to possible failure modes and causing them to engineer up to the very limit of the ideally possible."
This was followed by slides discussing the history of iron bridge technology accompanied by period engravings of the infamous Dee Bridge failure, as well as of the failure of the Angers Bridge in the US. The latter bridge collapsed when troops were marched across lockstep, resulting in harmonic oscillations in the metal superstructure, causing it to disintegrate. He said that he understood this problem from the start of his involvement with Alcor, and had asked himself, "If cryonics is a technological bridge to the future, what are the minimum required financial, and other safety factors, that need to be engineered into it?" His answer to this question was the creation of something he called "The 10% Rule," whereby 10% of all of Alcor's income was diverted to the patient care fund. This was to create a reserve to deal with the many unknown contingencies and inevitable crises that would occur over decades or centuries of patients' frozen storage. This was based, he said, on well recognized standards used in personal finance and wealth building, such as saving 10% of your income to prepare for the unexpected, and for eventual retirement. He said that this rule was also an approximation of the minimum required safety factors in various types of engineering prior to definition of the concept of the "reserve factor" in bridge engineering which requires the necessarily impossible, in the case of cryonics; knowledge of the Ultimate Strength and Ultimate Load to which a given structure will be subjected (i.e., RF= Ultimate Strength/Ultimate Load).
Darwin said Alcor abandoned this policy during pinching times in the 1980s, and that CI, which prices its services at about marginal costs and apparently relies on charitable giving and historically unprecedented rates of return on capital, as well as upon "very low estimates of the cost of money" to ensure a safe crossing for their patients. He characterized this as a time-bomb waiting to explode.
The next topic dealing with "initialization failures" was opened with a slide entitled "Frauds and Fakirs" that showed a picture of a shooting gallery of a building accompanied by another picture that showed Robert Ettinger with a mannequin and CPR machine, made during his appearance on a chat show in the US, sometime around 1966. The ramshackle building was the home of an enterprise called Juno, Inc., run by two dodgy fellows named Leonard Gold and Stanley Milgram. Not noticeable in the chat show photo, until indicated, was a small arrow pointing to a barely visible figure apparently standing in a wing off-stage. This, Darwin informed us, was Robert Nelson of Chatsworth infamy.
He said that Ettinger and others would go on television programmes in the US and hold up sketches of lavish cryonics facilities, which they said, were soon to be built at various locations in the US. He noted that, almost to a man, the people who had these schemes on offer were con men, frauds, liars, or at best, misguided and foolish. He went on to say that while it was impossible to know for sure what the impact of this was, "Certainly, there were some influential people who were opinion makers, both in the US and the UK, who were genuinely interested in cryonics. In the UK, there were Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers, and Arthur C. Clarke, all of whom had some credible interest in cryonics at that time." In the US, he noted, there were an influential musician and movie star, Artie Shaw, as well the entertainer, Steve Allen. These men (Shaw and Allen) had unpleasant encounters with such dodgy types which may have soured them on cryonics, and perhaps contributed to its perception as a con operation, or at least as a stinker. His point was that the people who started, and initially promoted cryonics, were uncritical and gullible, and that this perception alone could only have served to cause injury to a controversial idea that needed to be "bulletproof from the start."
He continued on this topic with an analysis of the cryonics career of Robert Nelson, beginning with the suspension of Dr. James Bedford in 1967. Grimly serious, and looking very officious, Nelson is shown behind a gaggle of microphones at the press conference from whence the story of Dr. Bedford's suspension originated. On the next slide, Nelson is shown attending to Bedford and injecting heparin into his neck as a CPR machine keeps blood and oxygen being delivered to his brain. The next slide was titled "The Press Release: "The first reported freezing of a human at death, under controlled conditions, occurred on Thursday, January 12, 1967." He followed on with a quote from Nelson's book about Bedford's suspension, We Froze the First Man, "When clinical death occurred, Dr. Fox was present and at once began artificial respiration and external heart massage, to keep the brain alive while cooling the patient with ice. Heparin was injected to prevent coagulation of the blood. Later, the team of Dr. Santini, Donald Bickerson, and Robert Nelson perfused the body with a protective solution of DMSO (Dimethylsulfoxide) using a Westinghouse iron heart sent by the Cryonics Society of Michigan."
This account, along with the complex procedure called "The Method," purportedly used to perfuse Dr. Bedford were, according to Darwin, all a lie. When Dr. Bedford died, Nelson could not be located, and it was Bedford's caregivers who had the presence of mind to place him atop a plastic shower curtain and canvass the neighbourhood for ice from the neighbours' fridges! Nelson did not arrive on scene until several hours later. There was no perfusion, and in fact, there was not even any oxygen on hand to operate the CPR machine. The photos were stagecraft to back-up a story that was both a fiction and a lie.
These events led to what Darwin calls "The Myth" and the "Media Image" that propagated the idea that "not only had Dr. Bedford been competently and professionally cared for, but that such was the state of affairs in cryonics as a whole, and that Robert Nelson had performed not only diligently, but heroically." His next slides showed press cuttings from that period, including the cutting that caused him to become involved in cryonics, a 1-year anniversary story about Bedford's suspension.
The next few slides were titled "Discovering the Truth" and show Dr. Bedford being transferred from the closed-up container in which he had resided for decades to a more economical multi-patient cryostat. Then, his voice quavering with emotion, Darwin had the next slide projected. It had a picture of Dr Bedford, taken immersed in liquid nitrogen, his face fully visible, in fact, recognizable from the thumbnail photos of him in life that had adorned each prior slide in this series. This picture could have been from a special-effects-laden horror film; Dr. Bedford's face is grotesquely distorted and discoloured, and frozen cherry coloured fluid fills his open mouth and spills out onto his cheeks and chin. Darwin explains that this was the reality, that in fact, not even the most rudimentary preparations had been put in place, this despite the fact that all involved had known Dr. Bedford was in imminent danger of death, not just for days, but for weeks prior to the event. What did happen, Darwin asserts, is that pure DMSO was injected with a hypodermic syringe into Bedford's carotid arteries, whilst CPR was carried out by someone compressing his chest with a foot! The discolouration was due to haemolysis and tissue damage from the DMSO injections. Shocking as this was, even more shocking was that Darwin said that most of the principals in cryonics at that time knew that there had been no perfusion and that the details of the story were a lie - wherein the end presumably justified the means.
Conclusion of the Second Part
Posted 07 August 2008 - 12:12 AM
I agree with Charles Platt.
I have not seen Mike's presentation. However, knowing Mike, there is no question that what he has to say is quite valid. Please let me know if he posts his presentation anywhere on the net. I would certainly like to see it.
The best way to describe Mike Darwin is that he is easy to respect, but is very difficult to like personally.
Most people I know despise him personally, but do acknowledge his considerable contributions to cryonics.
Posted 07 August 2008 - 12:28 AM
I agree with Charles Platt.
I have not seen Mike's presentation. However, knowing Mike, there is no question that what he has to say is quite valid. Please let me know if he posts his presentation anywhere on the net. I would certainly like to see it.
The best way to describe Mike Darwin is that he is easy to respect, but is very difficult to like personally.
Most people I know despise him personally, but do acknowledge his considerable contributions to cryonics.
Having just spent considerable time with Mike. I'd be interested to know how you know him, and what is your personal opinion of him?
Posted 07 August 2008 - 01:23 AM
Posted 07 August 2008 - 04:13 AM
Posted 07 August 2008 - 08:39 AM
Posted 07 August 2008 - 11:13 AM
In August, Mike Darwin will be speaking in London on the topic "Cryonics: Why it has failed, and possible ways to fix it":
http://extrobritanni...d-possible.html
Posted 07 August 2008 - 12:06 PM
Posted 08 August 2008 - 04:52 AM
I know Mike from Alcor in the late 80's. I lived in SoCal from '85 until late '89.
I respect Mike's capabilities and accomplishments. There is no question that he has had a tremendous influence (positive) on the development of cryonics, both organizationally and technically. Much of the research Alcor did in the 80's was either conducted personally by him or directed by him. What I especially appreciated about him was his honest approach to technical issues involved in cryo-preservation and his lack of fantasy about what can and cannot be done.
The problem with him personally is that I believe him to be quite narcissistic. He has a tendency to manipulate people for his own edification, which has been quite disastrous for the people and organizations that he has worked with.
I think he would make an excellent consultant that you hire on a contract basis to solve a technical problem. However, I think he is a disaster to work with in a long term relationship (i.e. employee or manager of organization).
This was one of the few serious interludes in what was otherwise a cheerful and agreeable day. When I try to summarise a man's character I find that images of his face pop into my mind. The images of Mike Darwin from yesterday that enter my mind, are of a man smiling, laughing, and sometimes grinning lasciviously. We spent the early evening in a gay pub called Compton's, in an upstairs room that was a veritable feast of gentlemanly decor, sitting at a table adjacent to an open balcony window overlooking the bustling, and sometimes boisterous, street below. My last image of Mike was at my leave-taking, and it was the picture of a man who is thoroughly enjoying life, and who is remarkably comfortable in his own skin. I'm not sure how to reconcile that with the other Mike Darwin I've heard about.
Posted 08 August 2008 - 07:03 AM
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