[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

[John Clark]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 2:43 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

 >>  According to the lowest form of human life, medical ethicists…
>


> John from the tone of your comment, I take it you, being a higher form of
> human life,


Well..., I'm a higher form of life than than medical ethicists, although I
admit that's not saying much.


> > can give us the answers to medical ethics questions, and do so better
> than the experts.


Experts? How does that work? Does a kid who doesn't want to be a jet pilot
or fireman or cowboy but wants to be a medical ethicists go to school and
study real hard and thus become far more ethical than people who don't have
a PhD in morality?

I don't deny that sometimes moral decisions can be difficult, sometimes it
seems that it would be immoral to do something and equally immoral not to
do it; all I'm saying is that medical ethicists general rule of thumb in
deciding such matters (whatever choice ends up killing the most people is
the ethical decision) may not necessarily be ideal.

> In some ways, fooling with bexarotene is analogous to our cryonics: we
> recognize it is a longshot, but we know for sure what happens if we do
> nothing.


I don't think that's a good analogy. There are a lot of unknowns in
cryonics but there is one thing I know for sure, even if freezing my brain
with liquid nitrogen turns out to be a complete flop I won't be one bit
deader than if my brain were burned up or rotted in the ground. On the
other hand bexarotene might make the situation worse, or it might help, so
it's not really a moral decision at all but a objective scientific one
about the nature of bexarotene. I don't know enough to say what the right
thing to do is, but If you want advice a organic chemist would be much more
useful than a ethicists.

  John K Clark
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