From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Tue Mar 16 1999 - 12:48:40 MST
Randall Randall has asked,
>These people that you are speaking of must be unfamiliar with the idea
>of automation, no? I mean, the only reason that people now look after
>frozen cadavers themselves is that there aren't enough people signing
>up to make it worth automating. BTW, calling them "cadavers" sorta
>begs the question, and betrays the assumption that these people are
>really dead, rather than revivable.
Sure, someday someone may automate cryonics. That doesn't automate reviving
the dead though.
Anyway, IMHO, the world can "ill afford" to lose people who help to prevent
the world making cryonic mistakes, people who can point out the flaws in
cryonic ideology or idolotry, so that extropians don't waste even more
resources on it. Instead of trying to revive the dead, I think it better to
find ways to raise the living to the level of Stephen Hawking, Spider
Robinson, Doug Engelbart, Robert M. Pirsig, Neal Stephenson, Douglass
Hofstadter, Martin Gardner, Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Jay Gould, and James
Randi, for example. In addition, I think that cryonics drains resources that
could better go into finding cures for fatal disease and terminal
conditions. Frankly, I think the world can "ill afford" to lose extropic
cognitive dissidents, and I don't think living extropians should squander
the resources of their world on the dead, even if the dead have convinced
some people that they believe in extropy.
I think a more extropian program would clone terminally ill ultra-talented
and gifted people (that the world can "ill afford" to lose), because a
younger version of a deceased genius could pick up where the old one left
off, and do so much more quickly, given the advantages provided by more
recent technology and intelligence augmentation.
Furthermore, cryonics seems entropic in that it denies
that life may create even more talented and gifted people. Scientists
capable of reviving dead genius could create even greater genius, and
consequently would have no reason to perform resurrections. After all, it
makes no sense to rebuild a 1950 machine, when you can create a better and
more powerful new one to replace and surpass the old one in 2050. Cryonics
can only hope to revive talented and gifted people, but transhuman extropy
seeks to surpass, exceed, augment, and transcend what has gone before, no
matter how talented and gifted.
The extropian world can ill afford to believe that it cannot produce greater
talents and gifts than it already has. Cryonics contains the seed of its own
demise, namely, entropic conceit.
Cheers,
--J. R.
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