Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[John Mikes]

Irrespective from the hardship to decide when and who might have been the
'first' Mummy to tell tales and WHAT those tales might have been to develop
into later (religious?) tales, the 'Mummy' is an adult who was already
subject
to 'religious' stories of the powerful for subjecting folks to their own
rules.
This is an involved cultural history of political power development.

May I reverse your quetion:
Where did the first 'interpreter' get *his* story to tell - and I am not
asking about present religious stories. Fear and fantasy, greed, etc. etc.
the basic human and late animal amotions construed fairytales of the
'supernatural' to be told.

Nothing tangible and/or of proving power. Nothing of a 'Supernatural'
being's "communication" - yet believed to be understandable(?) by a
primitive human (-ignorant!) mind. Told as a story, later even written(?)
into the 'Holy Books'.
Then came the adjustments to the 'understandable' formats etc. etc.
All that I place in the several millennia before we talk about religion(s)
at all.

Anyway: I am not a religious student.

John Mikes


On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Samiya Illias 
wrote:

> Where did the first Mummy get the tale from?
>
> On 18-Sep-2015, at 1:39 am, John Mikes  wrote:
>
> Samiya,* "forever"* is NOT a timespan, it is the *infinite* (maybe
> without an
> end, or without a beginning?) so your 'to live forever' may mean:
> IT IS OVER WITHIN THE INSTANT IT STARTED.
> (Or: it may indeed mean a duration without an end, as you suggest).
>
> THE 'HARD WIRED WITHIN' is natural in an environment of many many
> generations educated into a belief system from all around. The content
> may come from Mummy's eary fairy tales for the baby - and completed
> by studies later on from 'smart' books and 'smart' teachers galore.
> None has a reasonable evidencing base.
> JM
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 1:05 AM, Samiya Illias 
> wrote:
>
>> Is the 'belief in an afterlife' natural? Perhaps it's something hard
>> wired within, such that even atheists hope to live forever!
>>
>> Samiya
>>
>> On 13-Sep-2015, at 11:26 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi  wrote:
>>
>> Neuroscience as a new messiah. People's belief in an afterlife will never
>> go away. Especially in our enlightenment age.
>>
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Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[Samiya Illias]

Where did the first Mummy get the tale from? 

> On 18-Sep-2015, at 1:39 am, John Mikes  wrote:
> 
> Samiya, "forever" is NOT a timespan, it is the infinite (maybe without an 
> end, or without a beginning?) so your 'to live forever' may mean:
> IT IS OVER WITHIN THE INSTANT IT STARTED.
> (Or: it may indeed mean a duration without an end, as you suggest). 
> 
> THE 'HARD WIRED WITHIN' is natural in an environment of many many 
> generations educated into a belief system from all around. The content
> may come from Mummy's eary fairy tales for the baby - and completed 
> by studies later on from 'smart' books and 'smart' teachers galore. 
> None has a reasonable evidencing base. 
> JM
> 
> 
>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 1:05 AM, Samiya Illias  
>> wrote:
>> Is the 'belief in an afterlife' natural? Perhaps it's something hard wired 
>> within, such that even atheists hope to live forever! 
>> 
>> Samiya 
>> 
>>> On 13-Sep-2015, at 11:26 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Neuroscience as a new messiah. People's belief in an afterlife will never 
>>> go away. Especially in our enlightenment age.
>>> -- 
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
>>> "Everything List" group.
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an 
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>> 
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> 
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Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[John Clark]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015  Samiya Illias  wrote:

​> ​
> Is the 'belief in an afterlife' natural? Perhaps it's something hard wired
> within, such that even atheists hope to live forever!
>

​Well sure, a ​desire not to die must be hard wired in, every one of your
ancestors had such a desire, individuals who didn't have it
didn't pass any of their genes into the next generation. ​
Homo naledi
​, the human ancestor ​recently found in South Africa with a brain only
slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee, seems to have gone to
considerable trouble to bury it's dead in deep dangerous caves, and that
certainly sounds like they had some sort of belief in life after death. But
of course having a belief, even being absolutely positively 100% certain
about that belief, is not the same as being correct.

  John K Clark

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Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[John Mikes]

Samiya,* "forever"* is NOT a timespan, it is the *infinite* (maybe without
an
end, or without a beginning?) so your 'to live forever' may mean:
IT IS OVER WITHIN THE INSTANT IT STARTED.
(Or: it may indeed mean a duration without an end, as you suggest).

THE 'HARD WIRED WITHIN' is natural in an environment of many many
generations educated into a belief system from all around. The content
may come from Mummy's eary fairy tales for the baby - and completed
by studies later on from 'smart' books and 'smart' teachers galore.
None has a reasonable evidencing base.
JM


On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 1:05 AM, Samiya Illias 
wrote:

> Is the 'belief in an afterlife' natural? Perhaps it's something hard wired
> within, such that even atheists hope to live forever!
>
> Samiya
>
> On 13-Sep-2015, at 11:26 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi  wrote:
>
> Neuroscience as a new messiah. People's belief in an afterlife will never
> go away. Especially in our enlightenment age.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
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> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
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>
> --
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Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[Samiya Illias]

Is the 'belief in an afterlife' natural? Perhaps it's something hard wired 
within, such that even atheists hope to live forever! 

Samiya 

> On 13-Sep-2015, at 11:26 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi  wrote:
> 
> Neuroscience as a new messiah. People's belief in an afterlife will never go 
> away. Especially in our enlightenment age.
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
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Re: Cryonics in the NYT

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

Neuroscience as a new messiah. People's belief in an afterlife will never 
go away. Especially in our enlightenment age.

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Cryonics in the NYT

[John Clark]

The following article was on the front page of today's New York Times


In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell
to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze
her brain. As her pulse monitor sounded its alarm and her breath grew
ragged, he fumbled for his phone. Fighting the emotion that threatened to
paralyze him, he alerted the cryonics team waiting nearby and called
the hospice nurses to come pronounce her dead. Any delay would
jeopardize the chance to maybe, someday, resurrect her mind.

It was impossible to know on that cloudless Arizona morning in January 2013
which fragments of Kim’s identity might survive, if any. Would she remember
their first, fumbling kiss in his dorm room five years earlier? Their
private jokes and dumb arguments? The seizure, the surgery, the fancy
neuroscience fellowship she had to turn down? More than memories, Josh,
then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage whatever synapses gave
rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet every cat she saw
with a high-pitched “helllooo,” and inspired her to write him poems. They
knew how strange it sounded, the hope that Kim’s brain could be preserved
in subzero storage so that decades or centuries from now, if science
advanced, her billions of interconnected neurons could be scanned, analyzed
and converted into computer code that mimicked how they once worked.

But Kim’s terminal prognosis came at the start of a global push
to understand the brain. And some of the tools and techniques emerging from
neuroscience laboratories were beginning to bear some resemblance to those
long envisioned in futurist fantasies.

or one thing, neuroscientists were starting to map the connections between
individual neurons believed to encode many aspects of memory and
identity. The research, limited so far to small bits of dead animal brain,
had the usual goals of advancing knowledge and improving human health.
Still, it was driving interest in what would be a critical first step to
create any simulation of an individual mind: preserving that pattern of
connections in an entire brain after death.

“I can see within, say, 40 years that we would have a method to generate
a digital replica of a person’s mind,” said Winfried Denk, a director at
the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who has invented
one of several mapping techniques. “It’s not my primary motivation, but it
is a logical outgrowth of our work.”

Other neuroscientists do not take that idea seriously, given the great
gaps in knowledge about the workings of the brain. “We are nowhere close
to brain emulation given our current level of understanding,” said
Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York and
one of the architects of the Obama administration’s initiative seeking a
$4.5 billion investment in brain research over the next decade. Will it
ever be possible?” she asked. “I don’t know. But this isn’t 50 years away.”

There would not, Kim and Josh well understood, be any quick reunion. But so
long as there was a chance, even a small or distant one, they thought it
was worth trying to preserve her brain. Might her actual brain be repaired
so she could “wake up” one day, the dominant dream of cryonics for the last
half-century? She did not rule it out. But they also imagined a different
outcome, that she might rejoin the world in an artificial body or a
computer-simulated environment, or perhaps both, feeling and sensing
through a silicon chip rather than a brain.

“I just think it’s worth trying to preserve Kim,” Josh said. For a brief
period three years ago, the young couple became a minor social media
sensation as they went to the online forum Reddit to solicit donations to
pay for her cryonic storage and Kim posted video blogs about her
condition. And she agreed to let a Times reporter speak to her family and
friends and chart her remaining months and her bid for another chance at
life, with one restriction: “I don’t want you to think I have any idea what
the future will be like,” she wrote in a text message. “So I mean, don’t
portray it like I know.”

In a culture that places a premium on the graceful acceptance of death,
the couple faced a wave of hostility, tempered by sympathy for Kim’s
desire, as she explained it, “not to miss it all.” Family members and
strangers alike told them they were wasting Kim’s precious remaining time
on a pipe dream. Kim herself would allow only that “if it does happen to
work, it would be incredible.” “Dying,” her father admonished gently, “is a
part of life.” Yet as the brain preservation research that was just
starting as Kim’s life was ending begins to bear fruit, the questions the
couple faced may ultimately confront more of us with implications that
could be preposterously profound.

The mapping technique pioneered by Dr. Denk and others involves scanning
brains in impossibly thin sheets with an electron microscope. Stacked
together on a