OK, my question is, are these really random idiots walking the streets of NYC, or did the Voice edit them down to the ones that they wanted to hear?

Mindles Dreck has a more detailed explanation of the “committee effect,” and an example as applied to major technology projects. Sounds right on to me.

Lileks is back.

Well, he claims that they’re philosophical, but I disagree. “Markdb” (whose full name remains unknown, at least to me, has followed up his previous posting in response to my earlier dissection of it. And I should start off with an apology–I did do a Google on “philosophical anthropology” and there apparently is a field of study by that name. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has any relevance to the validity of cryonics…

Let?s see, there?s so much to respond to. First, I want to apologize for assuming that Rand et al. were using the word ?cryonics? in the manner that, well, that it?s commonly used by those of us not in the know. It?s defined in several dictionaries thusly:

cry?on?ics
n. (used with a sing. verb)
The process of freezing and storing the body of a diseased, recently deceased person to prevent tissue decomposition so that at some future time the person might be brought back to life upon development of new medical cures.

cry?on?ics
the practice of freezing a dead diseased human in hopes of restoring life at some future time when a cure for the disease has been developed.

Well, I’m indifferent as to how ignorant writers of dictionaries want to define it. Certainly that’s how most people would define it, so the question arises–should the definition be based on common usage, or on the definition put forth by the people who actually coined the term?

This is, of course, a problem with dictionary definitions in general, because it tends to be a feedback process by which people misapply a term, and then it gets into the dictionary because so many people are using it wrongly, and those using it wrongly point to a dictionary as justification for their continued erroneous usage.

I ran across similar example in a recent Usenet discussion, in which someone was trying to claim that the US is a terrorist state, because one of the dictionary definitions of “terrorism” was “A system of government that seeks to rule by intimidation.” Of course, by this definition, every state is a terrorist state, because there are no systems of government that can rule in any other way. Governments pass laws, and ultimately, in order to get people to obey them, they must be intimidated, either by threat of jail or some other punishment.

I don’t know the answer, but just because the word has been hijacked by people who don’t quite get the concept doesn’t mean that we have to acquiesce in the new meaning. Cryonicists know what cryonics means, I would submit, better than anyone else.

Next, even though he said that he’d come up with something new to say, in fact he hasn’t. He simply repeats what he said in his previous post:

Cryonics assumes that after death the ?form? of the body, its organizing principle, remains. But this is not the case. And that?s because the ?form? of a human being is a principle of life, the soul, and when a human being is no longer alive, when the soul no longer ?informs? the human being, the being is no longer human. What made the being human is also what made the human living. You can?t be a human being and not be alive; you can?t be dead and be a human being.

And then defends it:

This is not a bold claim. It?s not original. It?s simply using philosophical principles from the pagan philosophy of Aristotle. My point was not that you must know the precise moment when death occurs for these principles to be valid. My point was not that the ?soul? was a religious idea that science abhors. My point was simply that, given the philosophical principles I outlined in the post, principles derived, let me again stress, from reason, ?You can?t be a human being and not be alive; you can?t be dead and be a human being.? So, if you?re claiming that Ted Williams or anyone else frozen shortly after apparent death is still alive, then my philosophical objections, based on the assumption that the person was dead when placed into the deep freeze, aren?t wrong, they simply don?t apply since the claim is that the human being is still alive. So, it seems on this particular point Rand and I are talking past each other more than disagreeing.

Ignoring the fact that the “pagan philosophy” supposedly attributed to Aristotle is in fact a religion, he’s right–we are talking past each other here, and he continues to spout useless tautologies.

I don?t doubt that science will eventually produce technology that could put an alive adult human being into suspended animation. But I have no doubt that a dead human being will never be brought back to life by any technology no matter how far advanced (note that, if you followed the reasoning in my previous post ?dead human being? is a phrase that uses ?human? equivocally since ?human being? implies ?alive being?). I do disagree that death is ?gradual? as Rand has explained and my disagreement is based on principles of nature that, again, I outlined in my previous post. This doesn?t mean I claim to know when death occurs precisely, just that the change from animate being to inanimate being, when it in fact occurs, is instantaneous in the sense that what was a human being is no longer a human being. There is no point were a human being is partly alive and partly dead because that, again if you read my previous post, would imply a contradiction in terms.

And of course, the “principles of nature” that he relies on are Aristotelian (i.e., they’re bunkum…) He remains confused about the nature of death, and the definitions of “alive” and “dead,” and remains hung up on the concept of a soul, whether pagan or otherwise, and remains confused about the distinction between philosophy and religion, and continues to think that philosophical arguments can be used to somehow “prove” cryonics cannot work, as he continues on in that vein.

And he has no substantive response to my previous challenge: show me the soul, provide me a machine by which I can detect its presence or absence. Until you can do so, and convince me that it is a necessary and sufficient indicator of life, then there’s no way to convince me that death is anything less than an arbitrary and gradual state. Or that cryonics can’t work.

Just in case anyone was losing sleep over it, it turns out that the asteroid that had our number on it in 2019 is going to miss, at least that time around. This isn’t surprising–the initial estimates were based on very crude data. Now that more observations have been made, they can get much greater precision in their predictions of the object’s trajectory.

And for those who are interested in how the odds are calculated in general, here’s a little piece in Salon on that subject (thanks to reader Lloyd Albano).

Not according to Richard Benedetto. He says that Democrats who think that they can knock him off easily, or that the financial scandals are taking a serious toll, are living in Bizarro world.

It looks like he won’t go to jail (I don’t know why the Justice Department refuses to bring prosecutions against politicians, but that’s another issue), but he may not be a Senator much longer. Bob Torricelli can only muster 43% among likely voters. His opponent has the same amount of support. Numbers like that are usually a death knell for an incumbent. (They’re actually similar to Gray Davis’ numbers, but Simon’s are even lower.)

Whenever anyone tells me that Nixon was worse than Clinton, I think of things like this. And this.

They aren’t going to have to replace the liners in the Orbiter fuel lines; they think that they can be repaired by welding. Atlantis will be the first to be repaired and fly, and it looks like it won’t set back the ISS construction schedule as much as had earlier been feared. But this paragraph is worth noting.

The liners help direct the flow of propellant through the plumbing and past accordion-shaped bellows that give the plumbing needed flexibility for when the supercold fuel causes the pipes to shrink.

That “supercold fuel” is liquid hydrogen. Rocket engineers like hydrogen for a couple of reasons–it has very high performance in terms of fuel economy, and it burns very cleanly with oxygen, with only water as a by product. But it has some engineering design issues as well, and this is one of them. Thermal conditioning of the propulsion system is required to allow it to handle the large temperature variations from ambient to the cryogenic temperatures required to maintain hydrogen in a liquid state. This is one of the things that makes Shuttle so finicky and complex.

Another problem with it is that it is the opposite of dense (I like to use the term “fluffy”), so that very large tanks are required to carry it. For example, even though the Shuttle carries six times as much liquid oxygen as liquid hydrogen, the hydrogen tank is much larger than the oxygen tank. This need for additional tankage mass wipes out a lot of the theoretical performance advantage of lox/hydrogen propulsion.

It may be that ultimately, low-cost space transports will continue to use this propellant combination, but it’s refreshing to see XCOR and others explore more-tractable hydrocarbons, such as kerosene and propane. My suspicion, at this point, given what the real cost drivers are for launch systems, is that at least in the near term, space transports will not be using liquid hydrogen as a fuel.

Kicking a bunch of tired old straw men down the street, Chad Orzel puts in his two cents on the cryonics debate. It would be refreshing for the opponents to come up with some new (and effective) arguments, but after many years of this, I see little hope at this point.

Two main responses. First, I know of no cryonicist that holds out much hope for Alzheimer’s patients. And most cryonicists would agree that patients suspended under the rather primitive regimens of the last two or three decades have little chance, because of major cracking in the brain. But the argument is not about people whose brains have already been destroyed, or who were suspended in the past, so much as what we should do with our present level of knowledge, for people whose personalities remain intact at the time of declaration of death.

As for why the people of the future would reanimate those of the past, I would like to believe it’s because they will retain their humanity. I expect the future to be wealthy enough to do so, and for there to be plenty of room for them, either on planet or off. If that’s not the case, I’m not sure I’d particularly want to come back anyway. Mr. Orzel thinks that’s an unlikely future.

Fine, in his pessimism, let him rot–I won’t stop him. I find it strange that people who apparently so little cherish their own lives would also attempt to deprive others of theirs, however.

This is, at least, a purer version of Pascal’s Wager than the original. There’s no “many gods” counter-argument that I can see– the choice is really a binary one between oblivion and a life in the future, with no other options. If the four wagers happen to fall out in your favor, then you win big; if not, well, you’re dead anyway. But it’s important to recognize cryonics (at least in its present form) for the gamble that it is.

He says that as though they (and I) don’t. I know few cryonicists who don’t recognize it as a gamble. I don’t like the odds either, nor do they. All that can be said in its favor is that they beat the odds on the alternative. And for me, that’s enough.

[Update at 8:00 PM PDT]

Mr. Orzel responded to this post, and I thought it worthwhile to move it into the post body itself, not because it was in any way persuasive, but because (a) it betrays the mindset of those who are intellectually lazy and expect others to do their homework for them, and (b) it shows what those who are trying to preserve their lives are up against.

This doesn’t really address my actual point, which was to make an analogy between the damage due to something like Alzheimer’s and the damage due to freezing, which you elsewhere refer to as “tremendous,” and “a much worse structural insult than the result of almost any known disease.” If there’s no hope for Alzheimer’s patients, even with magical future technology, than I have a hard time seeing how there’s any hope for frozen people, who have suffered a “much worse structural insult.”

Well, your point is pointless, since I hedged with the word “almost.” Obviously, since the criterion is information death, Alzheimer’s is the exception to the rule. And as evidence that cryonicists recognize the disaster that is brain diseases, Tom Donaldson fought (and lost, though fortunately, his disease is in remission) a legal battle to have himself suspended prior to the destruction of his brain via brain tumor. This is a fact with which anyone interested could have become acquainted via a Google search.

And my comment was about damage to all the cells in the body, not specifically with regard to brain damage. The damage done by Alzheimer’s is different in kind to the damage caused by ischemia and freezing. In fact, I consider people in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s to be walking dead, by the standards of information death. If I were going to be suspended, I’d like to be able to do so before such degenerative brain diseases can take their full toll (or even much of it, which was what Thomas Donaldson was fighting for, and lost).

Also, is what’s done “with our present level of knowledge” really so different than what was done with people who were “suspended in the past?” The people, that is, who were frozen in the past two or three decades, who you give “little chance.” I can’t claim to be a devoted follower of the field, but I don’t get the impression that there’s been a real, qualitative change in our understanding of the process. “The past” is now, and the point is what to do about those cases, or rather, what degree of faith one should have in a technology that’s at the flint axe level, relatively speaking.

We know that past suspensions are problematic based on brain sections of animals that have been preserved based on the same techniques. The knowledge gained from this has been applied to current preservation methods. Is it good enough? Who the hell knows? All we know is that the alternative is guaranteed oblivion, absent the promises of various religions.

I also have a difficult time squaring this new “yes, but that’s not the point” argument with your earlier comments, in Bruce’s comments section, that “The assumption is that some future technology will be able to deal with the damage of crude suspensions, but because the earliest will be the most damaged, it’s likely that it will be “first in, last out,” because people suspended later, with more sophisticated techniques, will be easier to repair.” That seems to imply a belief that future technology will enable the rescue of even the most crudely frozen people, who you’re now saying have “little chance.”

Well, I don’t understand your problem, unless in your confusion, you somehow misread my statement to mean that “last” was of finite duration. Of course, the reality may be “first in, never out,” and cryonicists recognize this, despite your continual attempts to set up a straw man of a guarantee. There is no claim that everyone who has been suspended, or will be, will be revived. The only minimal and defensible claim is that those who have not, will not be.

If these are “old straw men,” it should be easy enough to re-fire the old torches you used to burn them, or at least provide a pointer to someone who does actually address the arguments, rather than simply blowing them off as beneath contempt.

Easy perhaps, but it takes time, which is the ultimate currency for all of us, particularly those of us who make no attempt to extend life. There’s an abundance of material on this subject on the net. You want a pointer? You’re too lazy to just Google “cryonics”? Fine. Try cryonet.org.

As for your attempt to deem me a would-be murderer, writing:

Fine, in his pessimism, let him rot–I won’t stop him. I find it strange that people who apparently so little cherish their own lives would also attempt to deprive others of theirs, however.

You’ve gone wide of the mark. If someone wants to shell out good money to swim in a vat of liquid nitrogen for all eternity, I’m in no hurry to stop them. If you want to make Pascal’s Wager, that’s your business and none of mine.

Really? Then what is your purpose in (in ignorance, since you’re unwilling to do any research on it yourself) denigrating the concept, if not to dissuade others from believing in it, and acting on that belief? What’s in it, or against it, for you?

I’m attempting to raise serious questions here, about issues that are ill-served by grand but hazy claims about the glories of future technology (let alone the fatuous “holocaust” rhetoric you trotted out briefly a little while back). There are interesting questions here, about cognition, and identity, and what possibilities the future actually holds, and there’s interesting science to be done, and discussed. If I’m ill-informed, well, inform me, and the no doubt teeming masses of other readers who are similarly misinformed. Flip insults and curt dismissals do nothing to advance your cause.

Do you really believe that you’re the only one to be insulted here? Do you really believe that the issues that you’ve raised have somehow been ignored and not discussed in the almost-forty years that this concept has been around? Do you really believe that your implicit assumption that cryonicists are idiots who have never considered the issues that you raised would not be taken as an insult to their own intelligence?

Sorry, but trite recitations of oft-refuted arguments do nothing for your cause, whatever it is.