[caliban]

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?

[advancedatheist]

The last I heard, Mike lives in a cabin on an Indian reservation in Arizona and has conversations with himself about some ring.

[eldras]

advancedatheist, on 24-Jun 2005, 06:31 PM, said:

The last I heard, Mike lives in a cabin on an Indian reservation in Arizona and has conversations with himself about some ring.

He was at ExtroBritannia today in London and spoke brilliantly from the floor.

Contained, he is one of the best minds I've seen.

Amazing how a few people can catalyst and catapult a movement that has existed not doing much for yonks.

There a theory about the existance of the conscious particle.

He gave me some good pointers on Quantum Archeology.

[xlifex]

Mike Darwin still contributes to the world of critical care medicine and consults on technical cryonics matters "behind the scenes."

Last year, he published an article on the history of DMSO and glycerol in Cryonics magazine: http://www.alcor.org...SO_glycerol.pdf

Earlier this year he published an interesting article on the use of "controversial" medications in cryonics called "How Dead is Dead Enough?"
http://www.network54.com/Forum/291677/mess...is+Dead+Enough-

Having said this, cryonics never really recovered from the loss of Darwin and Leaf's active involvement in cryonics research and daily operations, although there are some similarities between how Darwin approached cryonics and how Ben Best is running CI (transparency of operations, active communication with the membership, timely and detailed case reporting etc.)

[xlifex]

In August, Mike Darwin will be speaking in London on the topic "Cryonics: Why it has failed, and possible ways to fix it":

http://extrobritannia.blogspot.com/2008/07...d-possible.html

[kashmir]

I am currently writing a review of Darwin's ExtroBritannia lecture. As a result of that lecture I'm considering becoming seriously involved in cryonics and possibly changing the direction in which that my life has been going. When Caliban inquires if "Mike Darwin is a sensitive subject he must have second sight for trouble, because in the two days since Darwin spoke I've discovered that he is probably the most feared and definitely the most hated man in cryonics. As an academic who has also been active in politics from council to national levels, I've never encountered anything like the hatred this man evokes. It is frightening. For these reasons I've chosen to re-register here and protect my identity. In the pub after the lecture I thought Darwin was being a bit melodramatic when he advised one young chap "not to tell others in cryonics that you've talked to me." I don't think that anymore.

Darwin spoke for a mesmerizing two hours. I don't know how long my review will be, but as it is, I'm only halfway through the first of what Darwin calls the "four eras" of cryonics. When I asked him how many times he had given this lecture in the US he threw his head back and roared with laughter saying, "****-me! Surely you jest; Bruno would have had a good time of it compared to what would be done to me. Don't you know that no man is a prophet in his own land?"



Review of Cryonics: Why it has failed, and possible ways to fix it - with Mike Darwin

Mike Darwin. Where to begin? I'd heard all kinds of things about him, from superlatives to condemnations. The last thing I heard was that he was a mentally ill recluse, living in some isolated small town in California, or somewhere in the desert in the south-western US. I was pretty surprised to hear he was speaking here in London, and though I had plans for that Sunday, I decided to change them and go hear him speak. I didn't expect much.

Was I ever mistaken! I was so fascinated, awestricken, actually, that I didn't think to discreetly hoist up my digital recorder on its lanyard and turn it on until had he'd been talking for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Darwin is the most compelling speaker I've ever heard, and I left the college shaken and questioning some of my most deeply held convictions about what is really important, and how I should live my life. If I had to use one word to describe my reaction it would be "shocked." When I approached him after the lecture he declined to give me a copy of his slides, but he did take my email and kindly sent along the plain text from many of the slides. It is from these, and from my spotty recording, that I've composed the following summary and review.

I went to hear the talk thinking I was very well informed about cryonics, and I left realizing that most of what I thought I knew was wrong, a lie, or maybe more accurately, beside the point. He has the air of a caged lion about him and he started out by warning the audience that the topic at hand was something that was intensely personal, even emotional for him, that his words and the accompanying images might be deeply disturbing, and that he "didn't suffer fools gladly." I was ready to conclude he was daft when he said that "cryonics was the most important idea in the world today, one of the most "humane" ideas in all of history," and that we should understand he treated it with the respect those facts required! Then he let us have it: his first slide was of this kid kneeling next to a woman wrapped in aluminium foil and surrounded by slabs of dry ice. That, he announced, was a picture of him taken something like 40 years before when he was, I think he said, aged 16. It didn't seem possible since the man standing in front of us didn't look nearly old enough. I scarcely had time to ponder on this when his next slide came on. It showed his extended family gathered under a large tree with Darwin in his Mum's arms as a toddler, thumb in his mouth. But that isn't what you notice at first; instead your attention is captured because most of the smiling people in the black and white photo have scarlet-red circle-slash symbols on their chests, over their hearts, actually.

Darwin explains that all these people whom he had loved are now dead and that this has left him "wounded," and deeply distressed and angry, to this day. Above the photo there was a quote by Mike Perry saying something to the effect that "no life is ever rightly ended." He then went on to show photographs of himself as a child freezing and vivisecting turtles and sending them drifting off into the clouds enclosed in what looked like a small biscuit tin attached to a cluster of helium-filled balloons. Trying to stop and start life and avoid death, as a child, was how he got interested in cryonics, not the other way around, he said. These pictures were phantasmagorical and I don't think it is because attitudes, or the culture, are so different in the UK from those in the US. Nobody has a childhood freezing and reviving animals, vivisecting them, and sending them sailing off into overcast skies, American or British.

Then he started the formal part of the lecture. Darwin sees cryonics as one of the great transforming ideas of history, on the same plane as the invention of agriculture, the industrial revolution, or evolutionary theory. He posits there are fundamentally two kinds of new ideas, incremental ideas that advance our technology and scientific understanding gradually, and blockbuster ideas which he calls "paradigm changing" that overturn the whole social structure from morals through commerce. This is the point where my recording of his speech picks up and I've listened to it several times since Sunday. He uses examples like the Copernican system as opposed to the Ptolemaic, earth-centred view of the solar system, and germ theory as opposed to Vitalism. He argues that there are two ways such revolutionary ideas are successfully promulgated, principally by what he terms "seduction," wherein the populous and the powers that be don't understand that the new idea will destroy their most important cultural values and entirely transform their civilization. Instead, they are "seduced" by the "irresistible advantages" whilst being blind to, or ignorant of, the powerful transforming or damaging effects of the new idea or technology. As an example he presented the argument that agriculture has resulted not only in civilization and a huge increase in the number of humans, but that it has also caused a mind-numbing increase in suffering and a halving of the average life span. He noted that this has gone on for 10,000 years, with the return of the average global human life span to its pre-agricultural level only having happened as recently as around the time he was born. He advanced the same argument for the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of TV, which he termed "pernicious," and described as destroying everything from a proper attention-span to communal family meals.

The second route to introducing these so-called paradigm changing ideas is by what he terms "insurgency," a more or less militaristic attack on the "hard core" of the existing order. He relies heavily on the theorizing of the philosopher of mathematics and science, Imre Lakatos, who rejected the idea of mathematics and science as a patient accumulation of ever more complex truth, in favour of a model wherein advances occur as a result of dramatic proofs and refutations. When I spoke with him after the talk, and enquired about how he had come across Lakatos' ideas, (I'm a career scientist and a student of theories of knowledge) he laughed and said that, like Marx, he had been spending an inordinate amount of time in the British library (sic) "trying to find the intellectual foundation for things I've long observed to be true, but didn't know the proper names by which to call them. "

Lakatos proposed a model of scientific advance wherein there is a "hard core" of scientific or mathematical theory which is surrounded by a "protective belt" of gentle inquiry. It is work going on within this protective belt that incrementally advances or erodes the hard core of the paradigm. Darwin argues that virtually all of normal scientific research and institutional science operates in the zone of this protective belt, and that revolutionary, or paradigm changing ideas, penetrate the protective belt, smash the hard core, and thus demolish the whole structure. Whilst he was speaking I couldn't help thinking that the image he used in his slides of two concentric shells being exploded by paradigm changing ideas was really more akin to the smashing of the atom, and with similar results; the release of a vast amount of disruptive energy which could be used for good or ill.

The thrust of his argument is that cryonics, like Natural Selection, or the theories of General and Special Relativity, are core-smashing in character, and that in the case of cryonics the idea is so antithetical to the existing order of civilisation that it can it only be advanced by insurgent means. I sat transfixed as he elaborated the ways in which cryonics is "profoundly disruptive of the hard core of civilization. "

Text from his slides:

· Overturns the Vitalistic view of life

· Challenges the conventional definition of death

· Invalidates the core tenets of contemporary medicine

· Erodes the need for a mystical afterlife

· Radically redistributes capital and disrupts inheritance, bequests, and mortuary customs

· Mandates a complete change in reproduction

· Perturbs generational succession

· Requires Space Colonization

· Requires (and supports) profoundly disruptive technologies such as cloning, regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence

· Ends the species and Enables Transhumanism

Whilst I found these ideas a bit exhilarating, his next list of "atom smashers" was more personal and disturbing. These were things I had never thought of before, and that made me understand, for the first time, why cryonics has been so hard not only for society to accept, but for my own family and friends. Darwin argues that cryonics:

· Creates Survivorship Guilt.

· Indefinitely extends anxiety and uncertainty accompanying life-threatening illness.

· Prevents the psychological closure that accompanies "true" death with disposition of remains.

· Creates indefinite anxiety about the well being of cryopreserved loved ones. Disrupts the intimacy of family interactions during the "dying" process.

· May bitterly divide family members who are opposed to cryonics versus those who are in favour.

· Blocks deeply held mechanisms for coping with death and bereavement that are inculcated from childhood by eliminating the customary wake, funeral, and other comforting rituals.

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!")

He pointed out that the lead-off to the insurgencies of new ideas is dangerous and sometimes deadly and he accompanied these remarks with illustrations of the burning of Giordano Bruno, the trial of Galileo, and a grainy picture of Darwin himself, made from what appeared to be a press clipping, being lead away in handcuffs on charges of murdering a cryonics patient. The image of Bruno was particularly haunting for me since it brought forth the vision of him being hauled naked into the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, in 1600, his jaw clamped shut with an 'iron bridle,' an iron spike having already been driven through his tongue. He was then lashed to a stake and burned alive. It's hard to imagine more dire consequences from disturbing the culture than those.

From this intense discourse he moved on to discuss the origin of the idea of cryonics and to characterize the two men responsible for its creation and dissemination, Evan Cooper and Robert Ettinger. He described both men as very similar in temperament and personality type. Both were intellectuals and introverts, neither was of a practical nature with expertise in finance, enterprise or engineering. Whilst at pains to point out that he attached no blame to either man for their character, he noted that it nevertheless resulted in an inceptive approach that lacked the detailed preparative work and planning that must necessarily accompany the successful launch of any new idea, let alone a paradigm challenging one like cryonics. In our subsequent conversation he noted that both Darwin (the other one) and Marx were aware of the incendiary nature of their theses and that both took decades to research and refine their arguments with meticulous scholarship before exposing them to public criticism. He also made the point that cryonics uniquely differed from Communism or Natural Selection in that it proposed, and in fact required, practical implementation in the world in 1964. This meant that in addition to its ideological component, it required the immediate creation of a variety of goods and services, such as human-sized cryostats, rescue and recovery teams, perfusion procedures and equipment and so on.

His explication of the "medical, biomedical and cultural context of 1964," the year Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality was published, left me shaking my head in awe of the early cryonics pioneers. At that time, as Darwin notes:

· Discovery of DNA structure was only 11-years old.

· CPR was only 4-years old. Leonard Cobb would not hold the first citizen CPR training sessions in Seattle, WA in until 1972³ (8-years later).

· Uniform Determination of Death Act not passed until 1978 (14-years later).

· First Heart transplant was 3-years in the future (1967).

· Most of the United States had no emergency medical system (EMS), and ambulances were hearses driven by Funeral Directors. The "White Paper" (Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society) which lead to the creation of the EMS was not published until 1966.

In his lecture he said that no one would have a chance of success if they ventured to launch an enterprise of any scale without a business plan, and he noted that cryonics started without any significant or detailed forethought on practical matters. He divides the history of cryonics into four eras, each with their achievements, and with each ending in ultimate failure to put the idea over. He posits the first era as from 1964 to 1972 and characterizes it as doomed by incompatibility with the existing "medical, biomedical and cultural context" of the time, as well as due to a list of what he terms "initialization failures" Again, from his slides:

· No entrepreneurship; abdication of responsibility for implementation of cryonics to others.

· No first approximation of technological specifications. No business planning.

· Active endorsement of con men, frauds and the incompetent.

· Failure to define death with scientific rigor and to establish "cryonic suspension" as a "fourth state" as distinguished from life, death, and true suspended animation (i.e., a condition with an uncertain prognosis and an uncertain time course to resolution).

· Use of the words death and dead to describe cryopatients.

· Identification and alliance with the mortuary and cemetery trades, as opposed to the medical and scientific professions.

· Failure to develop any in-house standards of care, either technical or financial. Failure to professionalize cryonics.

It wasn't clear to me how you could have a business plan for something like cryonics in 1964 until he showed how it should have been done, and how it ultimately was done, about a decade later. He presented a box-diagram chart showing what he termed the "critical functional elements" that were required for a cryonics program in 1964. This included both institutional elements such as brochures, educational seminars, legal counselling, management, financial arrangements, cost estimating and the like; as well as technical elements such as an emergency notification system, a perfusion and storage facility and equipment required to provide liquid nitrogen storage. He then chose one of these "critical elements," the emergency notification system, and performed a "subsystem" analysis defining all the necessary ingredients as understood in 1964 from which ran the gamut from a costly item such as a CPR machine called the" Iron Heart," to cotton balls and a bottle of alcohol! He argued that these things needed to be enumerated and cost-determined as part of a comprehensive blueprint for implementing the cryonics program. He noted that this was best practice at the time in most large enterprises, and had reached a highly developed state and was mandated as best practice in the aerospace industry.

In fact, he made the point with his next slide that it was not until an aerospace engineer, Fred Chamberlain, and a businessman, Art Quaife, came into leadership positions within cryonics that these critical elements were more or less put into place around 1975. Fascinating pictures from this period were shown documenting the development of the first procedures and accompanying instruction manuals for recovery and perfusion, as well the design and construction of the first hardware for performing suspensions, including construction of a mobile perfusion theatre in the mid-1970s! I had no idea any of this had happened, let alone that there were photographs of it! He noted that these initialization failures resulted in a "cascade of follow-on problems such as lack of adequate capitalization, no access to high quality profession and technical services such as physicians, cryobiologists, businessmen, cryogenic equipment manufacturers, intense hostility from the scientific community at large, lastly, the Chatsworth calamity."

The next problem he identified, and one which he said has grown over time until it has almost overwhelmed cryonics today, is what he referred to as "temporal load shifting" or the problem of "our friends in the future. " Darwin describes "our friends in the future" as an utterly corrosive idea that is nevertheless intrinsic to the success of cryonics" (we can't revive ourselves!). As the text to the slides in this part of the talk note: "Our friends in the future have unknown limitations and it is all too easy to believe they will have none. Even more conveniently, those "friends" are not yet born, so they cannot possibly object. Shifting our technological and financial shortcomings today onto a potentially "near omnipotent" future technology is easy, seemingly creditable, and removes the burden for urgent (or any) action to improve things now." He described how this notion caused cryonicists to increasingly shift the burdens, technological and financial, present and future, onto the people who we believe will revive us from suspension. In our later conversation, he referred to this as "Trans-Temporal Communism:" from cryonicists now according our ability (none); and from our "friends in the future" according to our needs (infinite). "He said this was politically incorrect and so he could not use it in his presentation.

His next slide pictured Robbie the Robot from the classic SciFi film "Forbidden Planet" along with this text: How accurate is our vision of the future? How much hubris can we afford to have as seers, when our very lives depend upon the outcome? How many of your friends today are willing to pay for all your medical expenses, as well as set you up in a new life whilst feeding, clothing and housing you while you are re-educated, retrained and put back on your feet? What moral and cultural code will make tomorrow's people, or Transhumans, different from Bill Gates, or even the Dali Lama, and how they treat their friends in need today?" And he noted that Robbie the Robot was once his vision of what the future would be like. Darwin argues that an even more damaging extension of this idea is the concept that "the Singularity is at hand, and therefore any expenditure of effort on cryonics makes little sense to the young and hopeful. Omega point technology will allow resurrection of everyone – even the long dead – so why bother?"

He then asked us "Who of you here today hold this position? Will one of you please come to the front of the room?" Whereupon with a bit prodding a reluctant volunteer stepped forward and Darwin proposed to put out his eye with a ballpoint pen, saying that it should make little difference to the chap since the Singularity is at hand, and certainly long before then it will be possible to replace a missing eye! And besides, it was only one eye and the memory of the pain would be nothing to an immortal Transhuman. It is hard to describe this moment. Darwin is a peculiar combination of the wild-man American televangelist, Richard Fenyman giving his famous lectures, and Churchill lashing out against the Germans during the Blitz. He made his point that sitting on your arse and waiting for the Singularity, or relying on your friends in the future was "grotesquely immoral and inhuman since it meant subjecting ourselves and everyone around us to the unspeakable horrors of aging, death and disease, as well as to the terror that accompanies them." He said that no matter what happens in the future, this suffering is real and has meaning, and that just as no sane person would allow his eye to be poked out today because of his certainty about future technological advances, similarly no sane, and as he further emphasized, "certainly no moral person would allow the suffering and the death of billions when it could be avoided by action now."

[advancedatheist]

Quote

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.

[xlifex]

advancedatheist, on 4-Aug 2008, 04:40 PM, said:

Quote

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.

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.

This post has been edited by xlifex: 04 August 2008 - 10:32 PM

[advancedatheist]

xlifex, on 4-Aug 2008, 10:31 PM, said:

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.

Robert Ettinger argued for something like Mike Darwin's viewpoint back in 1972 in his book Man Into Superman:

Quote

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.

In other words, one of the founders of cryonics explicitly connected cryonics with "transhumanism" (the "new meliorism" phrase never caught on) in its very early days.

[kurt9]

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.

[AdamSummerfield]

It was certainly a gripping talk and being a teenager and focusing on other areas of science, prior to Saturday I knew very little of cryonics. I hope we never have to resort to cryonics, but perhaps Darwin or someone else will manage to invoke people with real commitment to cryonics to join the field. There were a couple of very tense moments during his talk.

[xlifex]

Mike Darwin is a complex personality, but one reason why he has become so unpopular is because he speaks truth to power. There is an increasing tendency in cryonics to cover up mistakes, promote incompetent people to management and Board positions (a trend that still persists), and to solve operational problems by throwing more money at it. Unless there is a real shakeup at organizations like Alcor, Mike Darwin will have his work cut out for him.

So, some people may dislike Mike Darwin for his person, but others just dislike him because he shows that the emperor (contemporary cryonics) is wearing no clothes.

[Shannon Vyff]

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.

I appreciate the time involved in putting up Mike's recent presentation, anyone that wants to know more can read the vast amounts of history at Alcor, CI and even contained in various places like Wikipedia (thanks to knowledgeable cryonicst volunteers who have been in the movement many decades). I really didn't have any new ideas or insights while reading Mike's presentation, and think he is too black and white, even wrong in some areas... but his fanaticism is needed. There is much that I agree with, such as Charles mentioned.

I've always been idealistic, but have never thought that I'd not have to resort to cryonics--although I'm a 300 member, and support AI organizations. I became a cryonicist in heart at 19, and on paper at 21. I've worked over all sorts of scenarios on wether or not it would work, and how that would effect me, my family or society in general, over the years... the problem of how much should be spent now on research, vs. what should be left for future technology will always be a problem. Thankfully even though we rely on donations and the payments of our members, the research goes on--and someday I do hope within my lifetime, we'll get that paradigm shift

[advancedatheist]

Shannon, on 6-Aug 2008, 02:56 AM, said:

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.

That wouldn't necessarily make any difference to the public's perception of cryonics. We can currently clone a number of species of mammals (yesterday's science fiction made real today). But the idea of human cloning still generates enough of an irrational "yuck" response that conservative bioethicists have exploited discomfort with human cloning to advance their everyone-has-to-die-on-schedule agenda. I don't know if the healthy revival of a frozen mammal will also give people the creeps, but I can imagine a scenario where it remains the proverbial "laboratory curiosity" instead of suggesting new pathways in human medicine.

[Shannon Vyff]

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.

[advancedatheist]

Shannon, on 6-Aug 2008, 03:14 AM, said:

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.

We tolerate doing things to nonhuman mammals that we wouldn't consider doing to humans for allegedly "ethical" reasons. It wouldn't surprise me if those meddling bioethicists jump right in with arguments against using this technology on people suffering from terminal illnesses or currently untreatable traumas based on the kinds of considerations Mike Darwin gives. We have a whole world view tied up with disposing of dead people, dealing with the emotional effects of their loss (this psychobabble about "closure"), wrapping up their affairs (like that weird cult following Randy Pausch attracted with his "last lecture"), dividing up their worldly goods and making room for future generations -- and here comes cryonics to disturb that process.

[bgwowk]

Shannon, on 5-Aug 2008, 09:56 PM, said:

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.

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.

As Thomas Donaldson wrote many years ago

http://www.alcor.org...Archeology.html

Quote

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.

When people say that they hope they never need cryonics, I'm not sure in what sense they mean this. Do they mean that in the same sense that we all hope we never have to go to a hospital, even though the probability of eventually being hospitalized for some reason converges to near certainty? Or do they actually believe that they may never need cryonics? Such a belief is equivalent to the belief that one will never suffer a medical crisis that is untreatable by available medicine. I suppose an alternative possibility is the belief that one's first and last major medical crisis will be vaporization. That doesn't seem very likely. We live in a time when for the foreseeable future, Singularity or not, virtually everbody is going to need some form of cryonics at some time.

[natasha]

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

[Mind]

Quote

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.

This is the key philosophical point behind most of the futuristic ideas ranging from cryonics, to transhumanism, to singularity, etc... Change is constant, the future is uncertain/unknown, and it is unlikely you will ever have even the tiniest control over its evolution. The vast majority of humans in the year AD 2008 cannot emotionally handle this premise and recoil in fear and rebellion. Bruce found this out when he started the Immortality Institute. After a while he stated that 99% of the people reject immortalism immediately. It is reflexive. No matter how logical, sound, and persuasive the argument, this 99% will reject the premise "out-of-hand". Cryonicists are well aware of the phenomena as well.

What is changing that gives me some hope for the future, even the near future (next couple of years) is the ever increasing pace of technological change. New generations feel the change and are more adaptable. It is a slow process but in the right direction.