> On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> > This sounds good, but even systems have to be interpreted by people.
> > Has cryonics produced results?
>
> Yes. Sufficiently tantalizing ones, yet no one gives a damn to pull the
> complete veil off, that's the weird thing.
Actually, I agree that cryonics has produced results. That is why I have
been signed up with Alcor for about a decade. The question I meant to imply
was what percentage of people, doctors or scientists would agree that
cryonics has produced results. Even obvious scientific results are not
always obvious to everyone.
> Extropy is not a religion, but cryonics tries very hard to be one.
I have been thinking about this lately. Religions are attractive because
they promise us what we want. Political movements are similar. Now that we
have decided that science is the best hope for our goals, we choose science.
But the goals are still the same.
We can switch from faith in an afterlife to scientific research to revive
cryonics patients. We can switch from a divine sense of purpose to a global
sense of history or evolution or progress. We can switch from an overseeing
god to an overseeing market system or humanity or scientific community.
We are addressing the same purposes that religion serves, and are trying to
achieve the same goals that religionists desire. It makes sense that a
developed scientific system starts to look like a religion or political
system. The difference is not in dogma, purpose, goals or organization.
The difference is in the scientific methodology. We use different methods.
-- Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com> <http://Newstaff.com>
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