From: "J. R. Molloy" <jr@shasta.com>
>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 idolatry, 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.
You have the same fears, based on the same lack of knowledge, as the general populace when it comes to cloning. Cloning only produces a biologically very similar organism, (not an exact duplicate) no memories are involved. The clone of a genius will not necessarily be a genius, in fact not even likely.
>Furthermore, cryonics seems entropic in that it denies that life
>may create even more talented and gifted people.
We don't seek to deny the creation of others, just the preservation of ourselves.
> 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.
Brian
Member, Extropy Institute
www.extropy.org