From: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 (gpmap@runbox.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 00:39:28 MDT
You have a good point. I would not say that cryonics is lower in
plausibility now than in earlier years, rather that we have now a better
understanding of the difficulties involved, so that realistic estimates of
when cryonics patients may be revived have to be set later in the future. At
the same time we have demonstration that cryopreservation is feasible for
some biological systems (tissue, embyios, unicellular life), so it seems a
reasonable assumption that it can also be done for a living brain, even if
this is far more complex technically. The information IS there, encoded,
perhaps just reading the information in a frozen brain (look at the recent
advances in high res brain mapping, there is an article on betterhumans),
may be feasible before restoring the same frozen brain to biological life.
I would say the same kind of things for the other examples. Cancer is
another good example, when I was a kid we thought that cancer would have
been defeated by year 2000. It has not been the case, but now we know much
more on the biology of cancer. The current knowledge permits realizing that
curing cancer is a very difficult thing, much more difficult than we
thought, but it also permits devising new schemes that, I believe, will
work.
Knowledge is always good even if it can be frustrating, at times more
knowledge forces you to realize that an objective is not so close.
Back to cryonics, I still intend to sign up and lets see what happens. Life
has always been a risky business.
G.
###Harvey: Before the imaging we thought a frozen brain looked pretty much
like a
brain. We assumed that future technology could fix it, or maybe nanotech,
or maybe we could just scan the structure and build a new brain. Now after
we have a better picture of what is going on inside and at the cellular
level, the picture literally looks worse than we expected. That is why I
consider cryonics to be lower in plausibility now than in earlier years.
Wehave more information, and the newer information isn't good...
This is what drives me crazy. So many people are quoting slogans or going
on "faith" in science and technology. Science and technology aren't
supposed to based on "faith". It is so rampant that I believe that MOST of
the claims and predictions we hear today in the movement are over-hyped and
predicted to occur much sooner than they will. This is NOT to say that I
don't believe in this stuff any more. But it isn't here yet. Somebody is
going to have to actually learn the technology and work on this stuff for a
few decades to bring about the stuff we are talking about. The pop-culture
level of discussion we usually see just is out of touch with reality.###
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