THE VENTURIST

VOLUME 4(4) 4TH QUARTER 2000 #16

News Notes

Venturist Annual Meeting
Talk about getting up and moving! The annual meeting of the Board of Directors of the Society for Venturism was held October 8, 2000, in a minivan heading north on North Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale, Arizona. No, we were not on the lam or pulling up stakes and permanently vamoosing, just taking an excursion to the newly acquired property where we hope a cryonics community can be established.

Board members present:
David Pizer,
Joe Hovey,
Mike Perry,
Mark Plus,
Mark Voelker,
constituting a quorum.
Absent board member: Jerry Searcy.
Guest present: Farzin Yaghmaie.
The meeting began at 9:52 a.m. David Pizer outlined plans to build a resort on property recently acquired north of Phoenix. The resort in turn would support a cryonics community or "Ventureville." Projected completion date: 2003.

Dave also noted his plan to leave assets to the Venturist organization through a charitable lead trust. This could set a precedent and such instruments could be a significant source of income for the organization. People could leave assets to the Venturist organization rather than their suspension organization to avoid a disincentive on the part of the latter to reanimate them. Mark Voelker suggested a suspension member could stipulate that assets would be transferred back to the suspension organization upon a successful reanimation. Joe Hovey asked what other sources of income might the Venturist organization have. Dave suggested the Society could act as trustee or hold backup funds for the purpose of rescuing patients threatened by the collapse of their suspension organization. Otherwise funds could be used to remunerate the patient's suspension organization.

Another possibility: the Venturist organization could hold seminars to raise funds. (This was endorsed by Farzin Yaghmaie.) A need was noted to align the organization as far as possible with the scientific community. Election of Board of Directors. The following Directors were unanimously elected by the Board members present, with offices unanimously chosen as indicated.
David Pizer (President and Treasurer)
Mark Voelker (Vice President)
Mike Perry (Secretary)
Joe Hovey
Mark Plus
Trudy Pizer
Farzin Yaghmaie brought to the attention of the group his organization, the
Center for Research and Education in Aging
(CREA) and handed out brochures. The meeting adjourned by unanimous vote at 10:37 a.m. The above is a lightly edited, slightly salted version of the meeting minutes respectfully submitted by Mike Perry, Secretary.

RECENT SUSPENSIONS

There have been three cryonic suspensions since last issue. Two were at Cryonics Institute, their 35th and 36th patients, reported on CryoNet by Robert Ettinger, in messages dated Nov. 24 (#15009) and Dec. 1 (#15059). The third suspension started Dec. 9 and is Alcor's 40th patient. Further details from that organization are expected soon.

PHILOSOPHY MAJOR

Dave Pizer, our President, has been taking philosophy courses at Arizona State University and is now trying to enter their Ph.D. program. Here's what he has to say:

"I am an `un-designated' graduate student. That means I have a bachelor of science degree (in political science with emphasis on philosophy) and am taking philosophy courses but I am not in the Ph.D. program yet. At present I am taking a few remaining courses that are prerequisites to get into the program. After I complete them, I can apply to get into the Ph.D. program. It is hard to get into and I am not guaranteed that I will be accepted." Best of luck trying, Dave; I'm sure the expertise will be put to good use in our efforts to convince others to adopt our immortalist worldview!

PREPARING FOR YOUR SUSPENSION

by David Pizer

[Excerpted from CryoNet message #15116 dated 14 Dec.]

A problem in several of the last suspensions is that the member/patient could have made better choices. It is important to let all your relatives and medical service providers know about your cryonics intentions and get their agreement to do things that will be helpful to your suspension, not just agree not to interfere. Get their agreement to cooperate long before you hear that you are sick. Once a person knows they are terminal they often start making bad decisions. The thought of one's pending death can cause such fear that a person can no longer make good decisions. So get all this taken care of now while you are able to make good decisions.

I have recently switched to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona as my regular family doctor. The doctor they assigned me was very nice and agreed to do what he could if and when I needed cryonic suspension. I am glad I discussed it with him, and if he had not agreed to be cooperative, I would have gotten another doctor.

OTHER CRYONICS MATTERS

In his posting Dave also notes that Alcor, his cryonics organization (though he is not speaking as an official representative), is not providing as much standby coverage as it once did. (Such coverage is very expensive and thus has had to be curtailed or, alternatively, offered at a considerably higher price. One of the main reasons is that it's hard to predict when a hospital patient will experience clinical death. Rallies from what seems like a point of no return are all too common, and at the same time, all too temporary, which in the past has required several fast outings by the team at thousands of miles and dollars per.) But standby, where the suspension team is by your bedside as you deanimate and can then swing into action (assuming caregivers are cooperative), is also highly desirable. It can greatly speed up the preliminaries and reduce the time before you are safely frozen. Dave recommends biting the bullet and providing the extra funds needed to get good standby coverage. Also, it's possible you have some credit for volunteer work (again, with Alcor, but it could apply to other organizations too) that would make it possible to get a discount. Check this out.

Robert Ettinger, in his message #15009, also notes that it was a "last-minute" case in which no arrangements existed at the time of death. He adds:
"1) It is usually not possible to make arrangements in these situations. If you are serious about cryonics for yourself or a family member, you should make every effort to join and get your arrangements in place before death or incapacity.
2) If for whatever reason you do find yourself or a family member in desperate straits and no arrangements in place, give us a call right away. We will try to find a way, and sometimes we succeed."
(Ettinger's organization, Cryonics Institute, will be found along with Alcor and other cryonics organizations on our back page; the Web is a good place for further information.)

The Venturist Board of Directors

Mark Voelker, Ph.D.,Vice President
David Pizer, President, Treasurer
Michael Perry, Ph.D., Secretary
Joseph Hovey
Mark Plus
Trudy Pizer

Reasons of the Heart
by Damien Broderick
Broderick is a well-known Australian science fiction writer and futurist. An abridged version of this article appeared in the Brisbane Courier-Mail, weekend ed., Dec. 9-10, 2000, under the title Faith and Fakes.
Permission to print the complete, original version, with slight additional editing by the author, is most gratefully acknowledged.

Broderick's study of scientific attempts to extend healthy human lifespan is The Last Mortal Generation (Sydney: New Holland, 1999), so far available only very limitedly outside Australia. His book on the impact of a technological Singularity is The Spike (Victoria: Reed Books Australia, 1997); a new, second edition is due from Tor/Forge in February 2001—Ed.

Kids do the darnedest things, according to popular TV specials. Adults are even weirder. You must have noticed that people believe the craziest things. And we don't just believe loony ideas—we cling to them in the face of overwhelming evidence. Fight and die for them, send our kids to die in our stead, unto the seventh generation. It's not always so lethal, unless you die laughing. The other day, someone in Port Germein, South Australia, noticed that when a street light shone through a certain itchy powder tree, it cast an image of Jesus Christ, complete with crown of thorns, on the wall of a nearby caravan park. A miracle! People flocked to marvel and pray. Cognitive scientists quietly pointed out that human brains are chockablock with specialized feature detectors. These useful nerve cells scan the world for other humans, clamoring for attention when they find anything that looks a bit like a familiar face. Blotches of shadow, in other words, had tricked people's brains into seeing something that literally wasn't there. But, like Mulder in The X-Files, they wanted to believe.

Sometimes, irrational notions can be wildly dangerous. Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) is a Queensland guru who teaches that people can live without food. If you trust her alleged revelation, we can gain all the nourishment we require from the air, plus a little faith. One hapless "breatharian" died after following this really very stupid plan. But hey—she had faith, didn't she? At least she was following her heart. You have to wonder what's going on in people's heads. Or is it their hearts? We're often urged to fear those who place too much trust in reason. No, we're told, go with your feelings, with faith. Reason, allegedly, is way too limited. Or maybe it's a plot by the brainy to crush the rest of us. Cold, heartless rationality might show us how to build a machine, but it can't tell us how to live our lives, right? That's the role of faith. The distinguished zoologist Stephen Jay Gould supports this view, declaring that faith and reason have dominion over two quite distinct and exclusive domains or "magisteria."

Still, if you were trapped inside a temple next to a ticking bomb, who would you rather have trying to defuse it: a well-trained rational bomb disposal expert or the local holy man with a direct line to divine intervention? By the way, who's more likely to have planted the bomb, a member of the Rationalist Society or one of your faith's doctrinal rivals?

Irrational behavior isn't restricted to a few odd-balls. We all do it much of the time, but that we use nicer words for it. We call it "faith" or "patriotism" or "the right thing." Or quite often: "Shut up and do what I say, God love ya, or I'll give you such a thump." The funny thing is that after you've been thumped a lot, you tend to come around. You find yourself clinging to those ridiculous claims you've been thumped for questioning. Maybe even embracing them with all your heart, dying for them. "The heart has reasons," as Blaise Pascal famously asserted, "that reason knows not of." Debates like this start off with phoney contrasts. Reason isn't some weird mental disorder used by cold-blooded creeps because they lack a heart. You couldn't get across a busy street unscathed if you didn't use elementary reasoning ("Look right, look left…"). We all have emotions and values, feelings of love, fear, curiosity and revulsion, that provide the motor for our choices. Are those feelings irrational? Wrong question. They are appropriate or not, useful or a hindrance. As brain scientist Antonio Damasio argues, feelings are not only important to the quality of life but crucial to the human exercise of reason. Feelings, he notes, are "a window that opens directly onto a continuous updated image of the structure and state of our body."

René Descartes blew it back in the 17th century by supposing that humans are cobbled together from a mechanical "android" body and a mysteriously invisible, untouchable soul, an immaterial essence designed to survive the corruption of the flesh. It seemed obvious that pure minds couldn't get angry or randy or sooky, so the body's feelings—metaphorically "the heart," since we so easily feel our emotions changing gear as our pulse slows or accelerates—had to be downgraded. A rebound was inevitable, when Romanticism played up "authentic" blinding passion at the expense of reasoning.

Now we know better. "The organism," declares Damasio, playing on Pascal's phrase, "has reasons that reason must utilize." Thoughts or ideas are "qualified" by feelings, which remind us how the world has affected us in the past. Feelings are short-cuts to value: powerful devices that help us nip through the waffle of unchecked logic.

The astonishing thing about today's brain science is that you can see this happen by viewing a magnetic resonance display. Reasoning or calculation is visibly done in the front parts of the brain, while emotional tone and urgency are added by structures deep inside, such as the amygdala. Victims of pre-frontal leucotomy, whose links between the reasoning frontal lobes and the emotional amygdala are cut, lapse into a feckless inability to plan or decide. They can know but not feel. And so their knowledge is short-changed, their reasoning not merely "cold" but unhinged from reality.

This discovery gets us some of the way out of the faith vs. reason mess, but we might still wonder why people believe such crazy things so readily. Of course, we flatter ourselves that our deepest beliefs are unquestionably true and make perfect sense. But obviously many other people hold firm to contrary notions. And there's no shaking them. Bizarre, really. How could people take such crackpot ideas seriously? Richard Dawkins has a persuasive explanation. He's the evolutionary thinker who coined the phrase "selfish gene" a generation back and set feathers flying. Another of his provocative ideas is the "meme," which (assuming such things actually exist) is a sort of atom of thought. A meme is a notion or behavior that can be copied. Like genes, memes are in a ceaseless Darwinian contest for survival.

It doesn't matter if a meme is true or not, what counts is how many minds it can infest, how fast it can spread. Of course, if a meme happens to be true as well as attractive, its chances improve, since people sharing that meme will act in ways that reflect reality. But plenty of our ideas and practices have no direct impact on brute survival. Fashions come and go, and so too, on a longer historical scale, do faiths. The vulnerable mechanism in our brains which memes lock into, according to Dawkins' clever insight, is language itself.

We're born drastically incomplete. Many other mammals pop out from their mothers' wombs ready to shake themselves off after a quick lick and scamper away with the herd. Humans take years to walk and communicate. Our inherited instincts allow us to learn to be social creatures. Many animals have brains pre-wired with instructions on how to be the sort of critter they are. Ours are more subtle: we're "hard-wired" to learn language very fast, without question, from the babble we hear around us. Instead of being born knowing Cro-Magnon or Chinese, as bees are born knowing Bee-dance Language, all we have is a very general pre-set grammar and a colossal thirst for new words.

Do you see how this works? Does it give you a tingle of shocked recognition? Kids learn the darnedest things very, very quickly, because their minds are ravenous for the pre-shaped knowledge out there in society. We have been built by evolutionary processes to gulp down the patterns we see and hear and explore. You just wouldn't get very far as an infant if you stopped every time you heard a new word and asked, "Is `cow' really an appropriate word for that big friendly creature over there? How about `gooble' instead? Yes, I believe I'll refer to Flossy as a `gooble'." It's fun, sure, but nobody would understand a word you said. Our language acquisition device has to be gullible.

It has to accept the input that comes at it without question, without stopping to ask if the customary connections between these items make sense. As we grow older, of course, we pick up extra tricks for learning about the world. For starters, we have to deal with change, so we need to weed out errors. Over many tens of thousands of years, human cultures have painfully refined these extra tricks into subtle skills.

Practical reasoning is one set. An Australian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs recently observed that aboriginal culture never invented the wheel—but what's much more interesting is that aboriginal people are intensely practical and exploratory, and can fix a car engine with insightful ingenuity even though the car was unknown to their ancient culture. (It's new to ours, too, of course.) Abstract reasoning grows out of such practical proficiency, unfolding into arcane doctrines of logic, formal syllogistic thinking, mathematics. These are difficult tricks for primate minds like ours, and take years of hard work to acquire. Even then, they're not terrifically easy to apply consistently. Einstein made some incredible blunders in his specialized reasoning.

Humans, in short, are wonderfully adapted for gullibility, because for hundreds of thousands of years we did better if we accepted the wisdom of the tribe. That was survival wisdom, at its root, but it quickly became tangled up in elaborate and sometimes foolish embellishments. Any creature adept at swift learning is prey to superstition. Pigeons in psych labs get fed when they press buttons with their beaks. Since they're usually doing something else at the time (one wing cocked, left foot scratching belly), that activity gets learned as well. Thereafter, the gullible fowl will prance and cavort to get fed. The reward for hitting the button convinces the poor creature that all that wing-cocking and belly-scratching is doing the job. Here comes the grain into the bowl, you beauty, the gods have been successfully propitiated again!

Reason tells us the pigeons are mistaken. It can also help us tease apart our own most fervently held pieties. Reason helps us discriminate between our deepest, overpowering feelings for our parents and other loved ones, of reverence for bravery, honor, service and courageous creativity, and our equally deep temptation to act like idiots when summoned by trumpets and pyramid schemes, or driven by despair and pain into the endless, useless search for miracles and absurd redemption.

The Philosophy of Aspiration
part 4 (Conclusion)
by Mike Perry

Background: My book, Forever for All, from which this serialized article is adapted, takes seriously the idea that persons could be resurrected from death by other means than use of preserved remains or information derived from physical remains, though such preservation is still considered the preferred course to follow. Here we take a look at the goals and values we ought to aspire to, in approaching a hopefully open-ended future, in which life no longer ends predictably after a few decades of progressive physical deterioration. In the present excerpt a future resurrection project is being considered in which individuals of the past would be reconstructed, generally in replica form, or as more advanced versions or "continuers."

The splitting identity is not a purely academic issue today. Cerebral commissurotomy, surgically separating the two hemispheres of the brain down to the brain stem, has been used with some success to treat crippling epilepsy. Patients afterward may appear normal, their former debilitating seizures absent or much reduced. Careful tests show, however, that one person has now become essentially two, different parts of the divided brain controlling different parts of the mind as well as the body, and generally behaving independently though usually with reasonable coordination. Usually only the left hemisphere has the power of speech, but the right hemisphere is capable of complex understanding of verbal and nonverbal material, and sometimes surpasses its opposite. More or less the left hemisphere seems to retain the personality of the former individual, including memories, and might be considered a "continuer." Whether this would be true of the right hemisphere too would depend on how well earlier experiences were recalled, and is presently difficult to test, owing to the absence of speech. In any case we can imagine various options opening to such cases in the future, the most obvious being to join the separated parts again into one individual, with epilepsy eliminated some other way. Other possibilities would not be ruled out however, including the two separate halves remaining separate, perhaps transplanted to different bodies, with any deficiencies in either (e.g. the absence of speech) corrected. This could be carried out along with creating replica brain parts that would be joined to reconstruct the original (again minus epilepsy).

More generally any single individual could give rise to many in a resurrection, and arguably must, over sufficient time. One possibility would be to resurrect a person at many stages in life. Such multiple recreations, suitably spaced over possibly long intervals of time, would, I think, enrich the overall experience of everyone and thus should be carried out. In any case, in a randomizing multiverse we can be sure that all stages of all people must be created in replica or continuer form, over and over, however rarely. By playing an active role we could help ensure that most of these constructions would happen under controlled conditions, for example, as more advanced continuers for the problematic cases, and have happy consequences.

Thus we can see the basis for a resolution of what has been called the "age-regression" problem. If we wanted to resurrect people, it seems we must consider at what age they should be brought back. Should a baby who died be resurrected as an adult, or an old, senile person as a younger person, et cetera? The ultimate answer, with our notion of universal resurrection, is "all of the above," though this would likely extend far beyond any first efforts in which only one of our possible pasts was considered and one continuer per individual was created. But with our notion of pattern-survival, the principal focus is really on person-stages rather than the total individual (or long segments). We are mainly concerned, in the first instance, with whether a given construct would reasonably amount to a continuer of some other construct (or more precisely, would instantiate a continuer of a person-stage that is instantiated in turn by the other construct). The two constructs would then represent different stages of one individual, the resurrectee being simply the more developed of the two.

The resurrection of an "individual" as a whole, in turn, is accomplished through the appropriate treatment of continuers, using the notion of convergence to an ideal self. As one possible scenario, then, we could imagine two advanced beings, both very intelligent and accomplished. One, however, happens to be a continuer of a person who himself had suffered a brain trauma and didn't remember much before a certain age, while the other is a continuer of that same person before the disaster struck. The one, then, would be a continuer of the later person-stage but not of the earlier stage. This should not seem surprising, since, by hypothesis, the later, amnesiac stage would not itself be a continuer of the earlier stage.

In the infinite, hopefully immortal future, I see no limits on the sort of resurrections of the above type we will carry out, always in the name of rational, individual self-interest, and with due consideration to all beings affected. Continuers of every sentient being at every stage of life, produced over possibly great stretches of time, should create a most interesting mix of interacting persons. This brings up another interesting problem, however.

The amnesiac, above, may want very much to have back his missing memories. We could make of him or assist in his becoming a continuer that possessed those memories, or a set of memories that seemed "right," and which would thus be authentic for some being in the multiverse. But there is another possibility. A continuer, perhaps much more advanced, might be created that would not have those missing memories after all, and would not care to possess this information, at least not in "memory" form. (There would be enough information still, we assume, to qualify the construct as a continuer of the memory-deficient original.) So in all, there seem to be many possibilities indeed.
We could argue that a person survives as long as some continuer of that person comes into being. Here I mean "continuer" strictly interpreted; the new construct must possess the full memories, et cetera, of the earlier person-stage. But if the earlier stage was not happy with itself, we might have to go to extra lengths to create a continuer that was satisfied with this earlier, less-than-happy creature. Yet I think we probably could, and this should open many possibilities for resurrections, in some form, even for miserable people who were sure they would never want to come back in any form. I'll boldly conjecture that a happy continuer of any being-stage whatever is always possible. In addition to "happy" I'll even add "also suited to life in an immortal society," to rule out the individual who is jolly but dangerous. I have no proof, yet I think it unlikely this would not be so—the space of possibilities seems too large to rule it out or close off any possible being as someone we should never attempt to resurrect in any form. So we could focus on those continuers who, we would have reason to think, would be grateful they were restored to life, and in this way perhaps resurrect, in some worthy form, all beings whatever.

There is one issue connected with the fissioning of individuals that deserves at least brief consideration here. In our world, true, total fissioning has not been observed (unless we count the rudimentary case of single-egg twins resulting from fission shortly after conception), and this has profound consequences. Persons possess property, contract marriages, are held responsible for wrongdoing, and so on, all of which would be called into question if individuals could be duplicated. (Yet the ability to carry out such duplication seems a likely possibility relatively soon, when we develop a mature nanotechnology, and not just in a more distant future.) If someone owned a house, a close enough copy would also feel fully the owner of the same house. We can also ask whether a duplicated criminal would be guilty of the same crime. These are tractable problems for our notion of pattern-survival and the possibility of resurrection. Yes, a duplicate criminal would be guilty too, but by the time that becomes an issue, we should have very different methods of dealing with "crime." On the other hand, we must not become too attached to possessions we "own," and I don't think we will need to be. If a person could be duplicated, then so could a house or even a spouse. But the world of the future will be different in many ways, and I think this sort of problem will not be among the hardest.

We considered the idea that a person P could possess so much knowledge of some other person Q that a continuer of Q could be constructed from P's memories, yet P himself is not a continuer of Q. Actually this issue, in an even more general form, is with us today. We may acquire a vivid impression of someone else's experience, a "quasi-memory" or q-memory. The other party need not even be "real" but could be a character in a novel or movie (but real, as usual, somewhere in the multiverse). We may be able to identify with this character and visualize the experience as if it were our own, yet on some level we make a distinction between this and what "really" happened to us. The same applies to what is going on around us, which we may learn about from news reports or the many books written on such subjects.

It is important that we can make this distinction—otherwise we might, for example, have to assume responsibility for a crime we so much as acquire q-memories of having committed! In a similar way, in the future, I suspect we will learn much more about different individuals, and acquire even more vivid q-memories extending to whole q-stages and beyond to complete continuers of other persons. Yet we will find good reason (and means) to maintain our own individuality as separate from the others we know so well. So again, as we progress as immortals, we expect certain unifying trends. Among them will be the increasing knowledge any one being might acquire of any other being. Over infinite time, any such being will, I conjecture, acquire total knowledge of any other, as part of an open-ended development that encompasses, ultimately, all possible things one can know. Yet at the same time there will be continuing diversity and separate, developing selves, to enrich the experience of all.

Turning now to another issue, we considered a resurrection scenario that emphasized consistency with the historical record. Such a resurrection, of all the sentient beings in one of the many possible versions of our past, could never be enontic—far too much information must have been lost. We can hardly hope to reconstruct, for example, the detailed identity information of persons 1,000 generations ago (about 25,000 years). It must be reinvented. So, doing this once, and extending the effort appropriately, will give us one hyperontic resurrection. Having done this once, however long it may take to complete, would raise the issue of doing it again—and again. Once more I submit that to receive maximum benefit over infinite time we would indeed carry out resurrection projects over and over. We would be running through all possible histories consistent with ours, and even all other histories as well, not to mention all possible, finite beings at all points in their lives. The relative emphasis might vary greatly from one possibility to another, however, so that some types of events and projects would happen much less frequently than others. But we would repeatedly construct the same beings, which, however, would then develop further and diverge from previous creations, so that each would establish a distinguishing uniqueness.

A xenontic resurrectee, who remembered things contrary to our surviving history, would no doubt pose special problems, but I think a happy continuer of such a being would be possible too, and would enrich the totality of our experience, at some suitable point. Someday, then, we could expect to meet Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells's Martians, or whatever other fictional characters have been imagined or could be.

Another topic to consider is how far could we go and still have "sentient beings" we might reasonably consider as subjects for immortalization. We mentioned pets, for example. What about the fleas that bite them? What about even simpler creatures and constructs, worms, say, or certain computer programs? What about "beings" we encounter in dreams? What about parts of our brains that may function independently as conscious agents, but of which we are not consciously aware? What about multiple personalities, that some apparently have? What about beings people sometimes think they are or have been, when objective evidence is lacking? What about governments and other organizations, which may be said to plan, decide, perceive, react, and remember, and thus exhibit a kind of sentience? What about patterns of sentience that might be expressed, however ephemerally and transiently, in the particle interactions occurring in such inanimate things as rocks, clouds, and stars? In general, the boundaries, quality, and moral imperatives of sentience pose many fascinating problems.

I don't have answers to all these puzzles, but the idea of resurrection through creation of a continuer seems to open very many possibilities here too. Thus there would be no requirement to recreate the physical form or housing of any of these and other such entities, just the functional or computational elements in equivalent or enhanced form. Similarly, there would be no requirement for a continuer to "continue" in the same lifestyle as before, with the same functions and purposes, so long as requisite informational ties existed with the past self—however that might be appropriately defined. A predator or parasite, then, would not have to remain such, but could become the friend of those it once victimized. More generally, each sentient being could advance to a higher purpose than originally designed for. I don't know what it would mean to be an intelligent continuer of a flea, but we have already noted that, in a sense, we are all continuers of the "empty being" that has no consciousness whatever. Such a being, we might say, cannot receive benefit, but anything higher up the scale might. So I see many opportunities for ultimately benefiting even what we would consider very limited life forms, and other entities of many sorts.

All these things will follow, I think, if the universe is able to support our immortality. Let us hope so! And if so, we can consider the possible rescue of beings, by the usual means of creating replicas and continuers, from other universes not so favorable as ours. Among other things, a universe able to support immortality must have unlimited "elbow room." If it is finite, as ours seems to be, it must expand indefinitely, if not in spatial volume at least in information storage capacity. This should allow us to carry out resurrections without imposing unreasonable burdens on others already present, as we have noted. Over infinite time, infinitely many beings could be brought into reexistence with no population glut, assuming the process was well-managed. On the other hand, if our own universe cannot support immortality, our best hopes must rest on benevolent immortals in other universes which can support it, or possibly on a succession of mortal but increasingly long-lived beings.

This raises one issue that should be dealt with, once more concerning onticity. If some universe allows immortality, though not our own, we can hope for an almost-enontic survival, if we are created as continuers in that universe. But if no universe whatever allows this possibility, then our best hope for immortalization would seem to be through a succession of increasingly advanced continuers in different universes. We would survive only xenontically—ultimately our historical records must be trashed, even contradicted, and this must happen over and over without ceasing. Yet even here I can see a possible advantage in an attachment to actual history. It would certainly make sense to be so attached, while a given universe was favorable to our survival, and we could prosper at least as long-lived beings. And perhaps, in the advances we could make, we would find the basis for some sort of orderly transition from one universe to the next, so the "trashing"—including our remediable deaths—might lose its sting and even be viewed constructively.

In any case, the transition to long-lived life forms is surely awaiting us, barring some catastrophe. It won't be too long, historically, before the biology of aging is understood and we can live at least for hundreds, thousands, and probably millions of years or more, if we choose. We will be able to set our sights on the still grander goal of true immortality, and see how far we can go in realizing it. Compared to such a prospect, there are many "minor" accomplishments which would be quite astonishing in their own right, though they could also raise interesting conundrums. One example is the possibility of recreating extinct organisms through nanotechnology. Recently extinct species such as the passenger pigeon should at least be feasible to reinstate, starting with genomic information recovered from preserved remains. A species is not sentient, even if its individual members are. What do we do about all the sentient organisms? Ultimately we are bent on immortalizing every single one of them, as we have noted. But, we could ask, what should be our policy more near-term?

I don't advocate a massive campaign, here and now, to freeze every dying insect or other moving creature, despite the appeal I've made to regard all sentient life as precious. True, overall we want to gear up to the great Labor of Love, the universal immortalization. But this, if we can carry it through, will happen in an unknown future. There are things we can be doing now, such as making arrangements for our biostatic preservation. But it goes without saying that, in nature at large, the birth-death cycle will continue for awhile—we don't have the resources to make a serious dent, constructively, if we wanted to. We should not be dismayed, in fact, at much of the massive loss of information that is going on around us, despite the emphasis I've put on the historical record. Eventually all creatures, and all else too, will come back, in appropriate ways, if all goes well, even if much is now lost. Meanwhile we must consider priorities.

In fact, we must consider killing individual organisms, on occasion, as the lesser evil: killing parasites to reduce the spread of disease, say, or a predator to save a threatened human. For the same reason war was justifiable under such circumstances as resisting Nazi Germany, and would no doubt still be justifiable sometimes—though it is becoming increasingly untenable and dangerous. I think too that use of animals in research, including sacrificing them, can be justified in suitable cases as the lesser evil. But what to do about sentient nonhuman creatures is something we must face at some point in our advancing future. Should we use advanced technology to eliminate animal predation, for instance? This is a difficult enough issue that I will not deal with it here. (It is addressed somewhat in the book.)

Something more is worth saying, however, about the idea of sacrificing nonhuman creatures. The issue then is not one of losing some tedious or uninteresting memory information, as above, but the whole creature—however, this creature is less than human. So we are led to consider such issues as how a future continuer of that very creature might react to the loss of its historical ties. This would certainly depend on the creature, or more properly, the continuer, and I'll conjecture, be in rough proportion to how "sentient" the original creature was. An insect-continuer, brought to a high level of intelligence, would feel less disadvantaged than an equally enhanced dog-continuer, say—supposing, of course, that we could carry out both sorts of enhancements appropriately. Perhaps both resulting persons would feel the issue too minor to think about—or perhaps not. But in any case we see that our concerns for nonhuman creatures should be proportioned, more or less, to the level of sentience involved. A mosquito is not a mouse, and a mouse is not a human. Nonhuman creatures in particular are not simply reincarnations of former humans, as some ancient traditions have held, though potentially they could develop, as I have conjectured, to levels equal to a human or beyond.

Proceeding to the human level, in the book I describe how I willingly discarded some of my inessential "memory" information and would not want to recover it as part of "me," even if I could. Someday, I will speculate, there will be a happy continuer who does remember and does value every bit of that lost detail, all the detritus on the barber shop floor, and much more besides. Its reasons may be very advanced and strange by my standards, yet perfectly logical and compelling by its own. But that, I think, will be in a very remote future. I don't think I—the person-stage writing this today—am likely to become such a being, but, in most of my continuers, will develop into someone else. (This will hold, even though I would also hope eventually to understand such a being, and thus to contain that being's extra information that I gave up, though not as part of "my" personal experience!) More generally, not all personal information is worth saving, though again, some certainly is.

But the whole emphasis I've placed on enontic survival is called into question by some who still hope for an afterlife. The devil's advocate may focus on "our friends of the future" who, if truly benevolent, will see that we are resurrected in a happy setting—how could it be otherwise? It might even be argued that we have more to gain the more remotely in the future we are resurrected, for then "our friends" will be that much more advanced, thus better able to make our coming back wonderful in every way! Indeed, with this reasoning, it would be advantageous to make it as hard as possible to be resurrected. So perhaps the less well preserved we are, the better.

But such reasoning, I think, ignores one crucial issue, which is that "our friends" will not simply live up to every notion we can imagine about "benevolence"! Instead, I have argued, we can expect them to be driven by a selection process just as we are, and to be looking out for their own, selfish interests. True, there are reasons to think such beings will show an enlightened benevolence, but these are not arbitrary. Instead, every act of benevolence will be done with some expectation of reciprocal benefit, as reason must dictate. In the case of resurrections, the resurrectees should be able to make interesting contributions to the lives of the resurrectors, and relatively soon, or be more interesting than usual, or in some other way offer an attractive choice among alternatives. So we can ask if it seems likely that future advanced beings would benignly shower happiness on resurrections of ourselves, in proportion to how much we tried to postpone our reappearance. I for one am not confident they would.

Here we see one way that death confronts us with a major unknown. For that we should keep our options open. A person revived from biostasis could always elect later to self-destruct without preservation, should that somehow be established as the better course. The reverse seems impossible, at least in the sense of restoring lost historical ties. I do think future beings will have reason to resurrect all others—eventually. By analogy, mathematicians will investigate every question that comes up in their many domains of interest—eventu ally. But there, certain interests take precedence over others, and I would expect this to be true in that other setting, the world yet to come.

There is an interesting parallel here to our earlier observations about putative beings who might resurrect humankind if our species cannot solve its problems on its own but ends up self-destructing. Again, if such a backup possibility is in some degree reassuring, still it is not what we want to have to rely on if we can avoid it. Advantage is to be gained by working to solve our problems ourselves, as far as our growing abilities allow, with the aim of eventual, complete success. Placing one's hopes in other beings or powers who may exist and assist at some future time but are presently unknown, unless it is the only choice, must never be the first choice.

Earlier I conjectured there would be definite penalties to be suffered by our continuers if we fail to survive as a species and must be recreated "from the outside." While it's not clear exactly what form these might take, it seems evident that there would be a diminution or loss of a meaningful interface with whatever reality must serve as our new habitat. This would follow simply because of the loss of informational continuity with our past, plus the likely strangeness of the new setting, even if we take into account possible smoothing of the path by future, basically benevolent, alien resurrectors. So there is a close parallel here with the case of a single individual.

The future, I think, will belong to immortalists, those who want to survive, to take part, as far as possible, in an ongoing, enduring, historical process. Self-sufficiency and interactions with others on an equal, reciprocal footing will be the rule. Those who already have this orientation today, and in particular have gone so far as to seek preservation of their remains for eventual reanimation, are in a stronger position than others. They should have fewer difficult adjustments if the future unfolds as it should, with immortality for all. They will even benefit, I'll wager, if their attempted biostasis fails and they too are lost, only to be resurrected by guesswork like others who didn't care or couldn't bring themselves to try. The reexpressed intentions of the immortality seekers will smooth the path when they, as continuers, are restored again to consciousness and can then get on with the wonders of living. They will not be so well off as if they had succeeded in their own preservative endeavor, but better off than if they had lacked the will and intent to succeed in the first place. But others too must eventually fall in line, and, I conjecture, will willingly do so. In time all should become good immortalists, Yuaians or post-Yuaians, at a superhuman level. Differences in status, honor or privilege should approach the vanishing point as all are exalted, though some important, other differences will remain and even greatly increase over time, to enrich the diversity of all existence.

But in particular I think we can rule out such cases as the being who persists in a state of complete withdrawal from actual events. A mathematically focused entity, for example, who cared only for abstract truths and spent all its time accumulating them would, it seems, be unable to fend for itself in other ways. Some interest must be shown in what is actually happening, and information about the ongoing affairs of the world, and oneself, must accumulate. If this must happen, then once again, it ought to be made pleasant. Again, enonticity is likely to be valued. On the other hand I would expect considerable latitude for one to develop as one wishes. There surely must be many ways of "making a living" with the advanced means that will become available, and thus a great diversity of viable lifestyles, attitudes and practices can be expected to appear. I have emphasized the value of enonticity, a tying-in with the historical process which we can further in our own lives today through the biostasis option. But it is also necessary to note that I don't think this value is absolute. There are indeed circumstances, today, that call for risking one's life, and even one's chances of preservation, if one has chosen that option. It is conceivable for instance that an assailant armed with explosives could only be diverted from killing others by putting oneself at risk. This does not mean one should save one's life at any cost. It may not be an easy matter to decide when a noble self-sacrifice is called for, and hopefully the issue will not occur often, yet clearly there are circumstances that would call for such action.

As one example, suppose a diabolical terrorist has trapped you and two other equally "good" people. You must choose whether you or the two others will be vaporized, anyone who is spared being released unharmed. The choice, then, is whether one's enonticity (or the chance of it) is worth the pains of conscience and other difficulties that could follow if one chooses escape through sacrificing the others. Here I maintain that proper orientation would call for the self-sacrifice. At least the prospect of eventual resurrection would be a consolation, and the clarity of conscience and knowledge that one had bravely done the right thing would more than offset the onticity issue, whatever significance that may have. This would follow clearly if one has proper orientation, including appropriate concern for the welfare of others.

Someone with improper orientation and less concern for the others may feel like sacrificing them and saving himself. Such a person could then make the claim that he acted in his own best interest. But I would counter that, in the end, he will be less happy, even if his onticity is preserved, and realizing it, feel impelled to a painful change of views, assuming the projected future turns out as it should. One important issue, again, is the sort of individuals and conditions one would likely encounter in an immortal future. A noble character arguably would have value enough to more than compensate the tribulations that must be endured to sustain such a character.

It is easy to imagine other scenarios that would raise the issue of self-sacrifice, some with the answer less clear-cut. Again, hopefully such predicaments will be rare, and you or I will not have to make such choices. But on principle we should be prepared. Milder versions of the diabolical choice are more common. A great deal of risk taking, for example, probably involves some slight risk to life through increased stress. We should not shrink back but, in appropriate circumstances, and even when the risk is great, take it to further the greater good, which we can have confidence is ultimately the best for us, too. Otherwise, however, we can and should pursue our better survival without the fear of thereby making a moral mistake.

But perhaps it will be objected that, if the self-sacrifice is ever called for, this contradicts the important principle that "a life rightly lived is never rightly ended." But really there is no contradiction. A life that ends in a noble self-sacrifice—temporarily in any case—is still "wrongly ended." Its termination is a bad thing, though a lesser evil under the circumstance. In any case we can hope that in the future such outcomes and the need for them will be vanishingly rare, as we act with diligence and wisdom to build a world free of mortal constraints.

To summarize the Philosophy of Aspiration: we should aspire to survival, joy, and knowledge in unlimited amounts, and act as best we can to further these aims, through seeking to become more-than-human. Each one of us must work out our own salvation individually, though interactions with others will be important too. Science, reason, and technology, we expect, will play a vital part in our actual transition to more-than-human status, and in what we do thereafter. We must always consider what scientific avenues are open to further our cause in eternity. Today we can promote our longterm survival through the biostasis option, and soon perhaps will be able to further it more directly through aging intervention. Individual happiness, on the other hand, is an individual matter, but is not best pursued in isolation, and we expect this principle to hold even in a future in which we have advanced far beyond the human level. Concern for others will lead to greater personal benefit through reciprocal interactions. On grounds of rational self-interest, then, we should love one another. We should seek to immortalize ourselves and assist others to immortalization. We should aspire to a condition of all being highly and, I would say, equally valued by all.

Following and adapting Fedorov, we see that the highest happiness can only be enjoyed by all beings together. The attainment of the highest happiness—and a meaningful, endless existence—must then be conceived as a moral project. Moral perfection must go hand in hand with the sort of future world we would like to create—one is really not possible without the other.

Immortalization will be an unending task for us, one we can "complete" only in the limit of time. The unfinished, ever-present task will always furnish "something to do," something of vital concern. Yet it cannot be ruled out that providing for our immortality, including resurrections, will, in the end, prove an increasingly minor chore that will occupy a vanishingly small fraction of our time.

If so, then we'll surely find other things with which to busy ourselves, and these will, no doubt, be most fascinating too. There is no way, as I see it, that an immortal existence would have to be boring. There is an inexhaustible family of problems to consider and reconsider, and we can adapt our drives and desires as necessary to make life worthwhile, whatever it is we end up spending our time doing. For now, though, the problem of death poses no small challenge. In our own time there are suggestions of actual, physical steps we can take to address this problem directly.

Van Vogt's Resurrection

It was with regret that I learned, earlier this year, of the passing of the great science fiction writer Alfred Elton "A. E." van Vogt (pronounced "van VOTE"). Aged 87, mind savaged by Alzheimer's, he died Jan. 26, and is now buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, Calif. Although I always regret the demise of people who aren't cryonically suspended, van Vogt has a special meaning for me. Among other things, one of his excitingly written stories helped me find my way from a supernatural-based religion to the scientific immortalism I so strongly endorse now. I read "Resurrection" as an eager 12-year-old just getting acquainted with the mind-expanding, joyful enlightenment that good science fiction can bring. An alien race visits the earth and finds all humans dead, reduced to crumbling skeletons and dried-up mummies. But, with technology beyond our level, they are able to resurrect a few of the earth's former inhabitants. Unfortunately for them, one of their charges turns out to be a sharp cookie himself, steals their secrets, and sends them flying, while laying plans to resurrect the whole of humanity, never to die again. True, the scientific plausibility of this scenario will seem highly doubtful to many, but I can imagine something like it being feasible, using ideas from my book, some of which will be found in the previous article. Using the DNA from the surviving remains, you could make a clone of a deceased human, as a start, then scour the planet for all historical information that might have pertained to that person, and program the reconstructed brain accordingly. Finally, fill in inevitable missing memory details by educated guesswork. Do the resurrection project not for each person in isolation but en masse, and make sure everybody has mutually, reasonably consistent memories about anything you had to guess. In this way you would resurrect one authentic population, according to the multiverse scenario, corresponding to a genuine past history of the earth. Given that the past has been rendered ambiguous by the loss of information anyway, this is the best you could do. So you'd get your resurrection. Not as good, in my view, as reanimation from a frozen state, if one is well preserved, but better than saying death is eternal. So A. E. should be back with us someday, along with all others who perished, though again we could wish for more.

[References will be provided next issue.]

Consciousness Seen in Context:
A Defense of the Possibility of Uploading

by Mike Perry

As cryonicists we are naturally concerned with possible reanimation scenarios, which might take many forms. Many imagine being reanimated in a straightforward, biological form, that is, with damaged cells repaired and rewarmed to resume their original function. You would awaken physically much as you were before your cryopreservation, only healthy and not dying. But this is not the only possibility. Another one is uploading, in which the information in the brain would be written into a computing device of the future and "run" as a program. The computer itself might then, for example, serve as the brain of a robot able to interact with its environment much as you did originally. Another possibility would be to upload to a stationary computer which would provide a virtual reality setting to more than one resident "agent" or person subprogram. In this way you, as one such agent, could interact with friends and loved ones who were also uploaded to the same system. Links to the outside or "windows on the world" providing current information could also keep you informed of important developments. These ideas seem farfetched to many even in the immortalist movement but should not be dismissed as impossible, for we expect considerable improvements in our computing devices with time. Moreover, uploading could offer major advantages such as freedom from future illness or disability, and the ability to easily make backups of one's brain information, to guard against future losses or corruption. Uploading may, in fact, be necessary for very longterm survival: a meat brain may be good for a few decades, but what about centuries and longer? A difficulty raised by critics of uploading is illustrated by supposing the brain of a robot has a person program uploaded, and the robot then behaves, as far as we can tell, just as the person should. Let's assume even the real brain's structural elements are accurately modeled in the hard- and software, but nowhere is there any protoplasm, only nonbiological "dryware." How, then, would we know that the robot was experiencing real feelings and not just unconsciously imitating them? A possible answer starts with the observation that a real person could be said to be isomorphically modeled in this system, all corresponding structures and behavior matching up. For this reason, uploaders would argue, we have no basis for not thinking the consciousness is real, so we may as well accept it for what it seems to be. But, the non-uploaders will counter, assuming that "isomorphism is everything" lands you in difficulties. Imagine a giant, static record, a very big book, with successive "pages" recording the brain states of a person, say, at very closely spaced points in time and down to the subatomic level, so that all changes in the quantum state of the system are recorded. (Each "page" would of course be far larger than pages of real books today, but still of finite size.) Here too you would have an isomorphism between the waking, active system and the static record. But the record is fixed—surely you would not argue that a book, however large, is conscious! What, then, is the correct resolution of the problem, one that would not make some arbitrary judgment about permissible and impermissible isomorphisms? In short, what isomorphisms really would preserve consciousness? What are the right isomorphisms?

Here is how I would resolve the problem. Consciousness, we might say, is a kind of mental motion. Just like its physical counterpart, it must be defined with respect to a frame of reference or context. It doesn't exist in total isolation. An isomorphism, however, is not restricted in this way. A sequence of movie frames could map to the real events that were recorded. If suitably detailed (again as a thought experiment) motion could then be perfectly depicted in a static record (the movie reel)—which would not be in motion itself. In dealing with a static record of consciousness we can apply the same standards. It is interesting that there is an implied context, the surrounding world, within which the record is "static": In effect, the context becomes part of the definition of the record. We need not accept such a record as conscious or as supporting consciousness in our world.

In a similar way we can rule out other sorts of entities being conscious in the context of our world as we usually understand it, even when they are isomorphic to systems we would consider conscious. This could cover the case of many computers spaced light years apart, which thus are causally disconnected, that collectively produce the activity of a conscious being over a substantial time but individually only do rudimentary things such as flash a single image on a monitor screen. You couldn't talk to or otherwise interact with such a being, so it is not conscious in our frame of reference.

On the other hand, a system might be so structured that it is reasonable to say that within it there are beings that are conscious relative to a context established by the system itself. It is easy to see how this could happen with a static record, if we assume it not only contains the brain states of some particular individual but a description of the surrounding environment, other beings, and so on. So, relative to the happenings depicted, these beings would experience consciousness, though not relative to us.

So now we seem to have reached the point where consciousness itself must be considered a relative phenomenon entirely, something that will certainly seem counterintuitive if you think about it. ("I know I'm conscious," you insist, "no matter what `context' I may be in.") So we may ask, isn't there a more absolute notion of consciousness, that is not context-dependent? I don't have anything like the full answer to this question, but two thoughts stand out. One is that sometimes a context is implied, as in the cases we have considered, that rules out consciousness. The other is that, if one accepts the idea of the multiverse (as I do) very many scenarios must have a real existence somewhere. We could say that consciousness truly happens, independently of context, whenever it happens, in a relative sense, for some universe in the multiverse. But we are not forced to conclude that a static record—once again in our frame of reference—is conscious.

Going back to the robot and the computer that, we imagine, are running person programs, we should have no difficulty as long as their processing is understood to happen in our time frame. Time is modeled as time in the isomorphism, and we can accept the apparent consciousness as real. It remains to implement a system capable of supporting this, so we can be safely uploaded!

"Hold your fire!" some will say at this point. Even if we allow that consciousness could reside in a nonbiological form, and that our brain structure is accurately modeled, how do we know it's us in that machine and not just some similar but different person? If you made two persons this way, they wouldn't be one and the same, would they? No, at least not in general—but the informational outlook that endorses the uploading possibility also recognizes another property: if people are reducible to pure information, as they must be if it is to be possible to transfer a person to a machine as in uploading, it must also be possible for one person to fission into more than one. And I see no particular difficulty with that idea. So, if you did upload one person program to more than one machine, you would expect divergence between the different person-instantiations over time. (In general, of course, the machines would be probabilistic devices just like their biological counterparts in the world today, not limited to one, predictable course of behavior. This would avoid the scenario of two instantiations of an individual that both run exactly alike—something that would, I maintain, require us to regard the two instantiations as one not two individuals. But this possibility I'll pass over for now, though it too poses no real difficulty.) Our future, then, could well be a computational one.