From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Sun Jul 06 2003 - 20:00:22 MDT
Harvey Newstrom reponds to the statement:
> > I have personally never really believed in cryonics
>
> Neither do a lot of former believers, unfortunately.
> Cryonics has to advance back up to the point where
> we once thought it already was. We now know more
> than we did before, and it doesn't look as rosy as it
> once did.
Harvey, can you expand on this?
When do you think cryonics was at it's high point
in plausibility and why do you think it is lower now?
If I was to make one overriding criticism of the transhumanism
movement it would be that there is entirely too much
"believing" going on and too little structured critical thinking
where assumptions are made explicit and are themselves
open to constructive criticism. We, this generation, including
transhumanist that I'd hoped would know better, seem to be
in serious danger of "believing" (as opposed to critical thinking)
another couple of generations to death.
Whenever anybody claims something is going to happen
in 5 years or 50, or that it is not, I think it would be prudent
to assume the person is just blowing gas unless they show
a line of reasoning for their views. In some respects
it doesn't matter that the line of reasoning may be flawed,
if it is out there it can be peer reviewed and improved upon.
But what is gratuitously asserted is probably best ignored or
gratuitously denied.
Two examples that come to mind of *good* examples
of this sort of explicit planning and thinking are Robert
Bradbury's paper on the Protein Based Assembly of Nanoscale
Parts which gives an overview of a development path towards
molecular manufacturing that can be critiqued.
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Papers/PBAoNP.html
And Aubrey de Greys paper on "An engineer's approach to
the development of real anti-aging medicine".
Science's SAGE KE 2003;
http://sageke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sageke;2003/1/vp1
Imo, the principle virtue of these papers imo is not that they
necessarily get everything right, but that they present an overview,
a practical scheme for moving forward. And because they are
laid out as they are, with assumptions fairly explicit, they are
themselves subject to constructive criticism.
Regards,
Brett Paatsch
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