[extropy-chat] hope you can comprehend

[Robert Bradbury]

On 5/19/06, jeffrey davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/17/06, KAZ <kazvorpal at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> >    One could eschew every and all extropian thought and still choose to
> > sign up for cryonic suspension, because it's a matter of sheer logic that if
> > you're frozen, there is SOME chance of you being revived, while if you're
> > buried in the ground you are absolutely guaranteed to be gone forever,
> > barring something super-natural.
> >
>
> Rarely have I heard it put more succinctly.
>

It is succinct, unfortunately  part of the statement is highly problematic
(perhaps even *wrong*).

Paraphrasing:
"If you are frozen there is some chance of  being revived."   True.
"If you are buried in the ground you are absolutely guaranteed to be gone
forever."  Not so fast.

For the last ~100 years or more in the developed countries many "dead"
persons have been embalmed and buried [1,2].  This results in a significant
retardation of many active (e.g. bacterial) and passive (biochemical) decay
processes.  Anyone who watches CSI knows that it is not unusual to recover
the DNA from someone who has been buried.  (In fact work is ongoing for the
reconstruction of the Mammoth genome from a Mammoth buried in permafrost for
~30,000 years.)

1. If you can get back the genome of an individual, you can get back part of
the basis for "who" they were.
2. If you have sufficient information about the person, e.g. biographies,
autobiographies, tax records, credit card histories, films of lectures (e.g.
Feynman), etc. you have a pretty good idea of "who" or "how" they expressed
themselves.
3. Depending upon the length of time one has been embalmed and the precise
recovery methods you should be able to extract the ultrastructural
information (neuron number, location, interconnection network, synaptic
strengths, etc.) from a "dead" brain.

>From (1) you can work forward to an individual.  From (2) you can work
backward to the individual.  Those combined significantly constrain the
phase space of "who" a person was to give you some reasonable approximation
of the person.  Combined with (3) and you have significant recreation
capabilities.  I doubt we understand the physiological & psychological
complexity of individuals sufficiently to be to evaluate when a "recreation"
is or is not effectively the "real", J.D., Kaz, Dyson, Sasha, Feynman,
Kennedy, etc.  A significant aspect of this that Kaz (and many others) who
consider this problem miss is how much computer capacity in which to run and
evaluate simulations we will have at our disposal in the future.  One could
wonder whether the "dark galaxies" that exist in the universe are devoted to
reconstruction & simulation activities aimed at "bringing back" particular
individuals who were critically important to the evolution of the first
"advanced" civilizations that evolved within those galaxies.

In order to be *really*, *really*, *really* dead in this day and age you
have to actually work at it.  It starts with a minimum requirement of having
your body incinerated.  You probably also have to incinerate your home,
office and car (leave *no* DNA behind), then you have to kill off a fair
number of your living relatives (who carry sufficient information that one
can get back to a reasonable approximation of your genome).  You shouldn't
purchase things by credit card, can't make investments, can't pay taxes,
can't be employed, etc.  Of course it goes without saying that you certainly
shouldn't be posting to the ExICh list...

Going back to the original statement -- there is of course the "flip" side
of the coin.  One could be quite extropic and choose not to sign up for
cryonic suspension because one doesn't want to be revived.  A *true*
extropian will make the decision whether or not to undergo cryonic
suspension on the basis of whether or not they feel that activity will in
the future contribute towards increasing the quantity and/or quality of
"useful" information in the universe [3].  One has to compare investing the
financial resources in the preservation of oneself as an ice cube for 20-50
years to say investing in the same financial resources in other potentially
more extropic efforts [4].

Robert

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enbalming
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embalming_solution
3. I would tend to believe that most people selecting cryonic suspension are
*not* making the decision on the basis of "extropic" arguments but are
simply selecting cryonic suspension out of a highly evolved desire for
self-preservation.
4. For example, donating the money to organizations that would limit efforts
to create advanced general AIs, which could in turn lead to "SkyNet" which
could in turn lead to the end of humanity as we know it.  Selecting cryonic
suspension involves a rather questionable assumption that the future will be
"better".  Who would want to be reanimated if the future sucked?  (Makes one
wonder what fraction of cryonic reanimation specifications include "only
bring me back *if*" clauses.)
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