Re: news spin on cryonics

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 03:54:23 MDT


On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 01:29:02AM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Is this news to anyone? Isn't it obvious that cryonics, life-extension,
> nanotech, and our other ideas are considered a UFO cult by mainstream
> science? I am not surprised at all about this news coverage, but am
> surprised by our own reactions. Maybe this should be a wake-up call for
> our movement.

Yes.

Unfortunately cryonics isn't good advertising for transhumanism. I have
great sympathy for it and think chances are that it will work, but
associating with it is bad for our credibility. In discussions it is a
flypaper: when you get into the subject the discussion gets stuck there,
and even many people sympathetic to life extension and other
transhumanist issues often have problems accepting cryonics. Once you
have swallowed much of the >H-meme complex it is easier to accept, but
it does tend to lose the just interested people.

> We are not mainstream and never will be. Anybody who
> thinks we are or will be is just deluding themselves. Mainstream news
> or public opinion would never be able to keep up with us even if they
> wanted to.

We are not mainstream NOW, but we can change that if we want. Or rather,
each of us individually has a responsibility to our own ideas to promote
them if we want to see them come to fruition. Thinking that we can never
be a part of mainstream implies that the best we can do is sit and have
fun discussions while the rest of the world gets to decide how the
future looks.

The scary part is that the mainstream is catching up with us in many
respects. I would say that there is not a vast difference between our
current transhumanist concepts and the ones we had in 93 - sure, in some
fields quite a bit refinement and plenty of neologisms, but very few
fundamentally new transhumanist ideas. Meanwhile the mainstream has more
and more adopted ideas of nanotech, cryonics (yes, although most mock it
they know the concept), biotech, AI and so on.

As I said in a post yesterday, it is not the tech stuff that is
essential to get into the mainstream. It will get there in its own time.
It is the ideas we have of what it could be used for that needs to be
spread. The combination of practical optimism, an open society, rational
thinking and a vision of an autoevolving humanity as something good
expressed in the extropian principles - THAT is what we need to
mainstream.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y


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