From: Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Date: Sun May 13 2001 - 10:19:51 MDT
As for cryonics, well, ahem, why not?
I'm not sure it's the economically most interesting way to promote
one's genes, memes, or whichever eternal things we wish to promote
about us "selves". Which raises the question of identity:
what are "we"? What is "I"? What am I striving for and toward?
A few things To take into consideration:
(1) we can promote these genes and memes beyond our individual life
by spreading them the "usual" ways through heredity and civilization.
(2) even with cryonics, life expectancy is finite, so we even with it,
we have to consider eventual use and comparative risk/payoff for
these former methods, too.
(3) life expectancy through cryonics depends on one being conserved,
despite the repeated violence that greedy people disrespecting one's
property might exert for centuries during which one is not there to
consistently defend it and adapt, until technology is not only much
much advanced than it is, but also not so much advanced as to make
the kind of individual resurrection to happen that one can afford
a kind that will the resurrected one a lone animal in a zoo, watched
with a mix of contempt, indifference and bemusement by much superior
transhumans. This can make the risk*(payoff-cost) integral quite small.
Of course, what's great about individual liberty
is that we all bet for our own lives, and
are ultimately responsible to our "selves", whatever they be,
for what we do toward the outcome that we desire for them.
Life on the evolutionary scale is the ultimate free market.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
Tolerance is not about believing that stupid people are intelligent,
it's about letting stupid people be victims of their own stupidity
rather than being victims of yours.
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