Why I hold Paul Kurtz in low regard.

Not only does Paul Kurtz write generally boring and undistinguished books and articles promoting what he calls 'humanism." He also provides material which supports religious stereotypes about nonbelievers, like his account of an atheist friend's deathbed conversion to Catholicism:



Even if this really happened to someone Kurtz knew, he didn't have to advertise the fact to the world.

While I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a cryonicist with a secular outlook would similarly undergo a religious conversion during a terminal illness, cancel his suspension arrangements and wind up conventionally disposed of, I find this less likely than the possibility of interference by hostile relatives. Atheists and humanists therefore might want to look into cryonics for themselves as insurance against embarrassing and discrediting themselves in similar deathbed conversions.

I have some macular edema in my right eye.

So today my ophthalmologist referred me to a retina specialist, whom I'll see on Thursday.

I can see why ophthalmologists earn such high status, considering that the human mind often metaphorically equates sight with wisdom and understanding, and blindness with ignorance or stupidity. The man who can restore or at least preserve the functioning of human eyes damaged by injury or disease has something nearly mythological going for him.

Didn't Jesus restore sight to the blind in the gospels, for example?

We also respect dentists as competent and necessary professionals, but something about the presence or absence of teeth just doesn't carry the same emotional weight as the presence or absence of vision. (I don't recall any dental miracles in the gospels.)

If medicine ever advances to the point where revival specialists in Future World can restore cryopreserved or plastinated human brains into functioning people, I hope that they will also attain high status for partaking in the mythological powers shared to a lesser extent by ophthalmologists.

That '70's Transhumanism in Brian Alexander's book

Brian Alexander discusses the WAY premature announcement of a transhuman age during the 1970's and 1980's in his book Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion (2004). Alexander credits the figures I've also identified as sources of this idea: F.M. Esfandiary (who later changed his name to FM-2030) and Timothy Leary:



Alexander also references R.U. Sirius in this chapter. Sirius says he interviewed FM-2030 about 25 years ago for a publication he put out at the time, and he describes FM as "massively well read," along with FM's friends who filled up their homes with "libraries and collections of recent scientific papers," apparently in a self-educational process towards accomplishing their transhumanist goals. (Did these friends include cryonicist compulsive hoarders?)

From hindsight, given the improgression towards anything like what That '70's Transhumanism predicted we'd have by 2010, you have to wonder what all that erudition accomplished. (Magical thinking? Terror management?) And why do the surviving transhumanist bohemians from that era, like Sirius, even bother playing this game now?

Does marriage improve men's health "retroactively"?

I started to subscribe to newsletters about health issues last year, before the branch retinal vein occlusion in my right eye two weeks ago pushed me towards becoming more proactive with my health. (BTW, this morning I had a blood pressure reading of 129/87, without having to take any medication so far to get that result.)

The July 2010 issue of Harvard Men's Health Watch has an article titled "Marriage and men's health," which basically summarizes what I've read in other sources: Benevolent marriages tend to improve men's health, while hostile marriages tend to damage it. I prefer to focus on the benevolent aspects of marriage, despite my reservations, so I'd like to extract the following:

A major survey of 127,945 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses; men who marry after age 25 get more protection than those who tie the knot at a younger age, and the longer a man stays married, the greater his survival advantage over his unmarried peers.

The part about the "protection" of men who marry after age 25 got my attention. It makes me wonder how much "after" that age you can marry and still enjoy the health benefits of marriage.

The article doesn't discuss the recent research on spousal age differences in men's life expectancy, however. And I'd still like to see research to test my conjecture about elevated levels of DNA repair in men who marry younger women, motivated by sperm competition, compared to men who marry women of approximately the same age or older.

Unfortunately straight men in cryonics face a problem which makes marriage additionally problematic: It seems like a "happy marriage" to a cryonics-hostile wife who will interfere with your suspension would defeat your health-seeking purpose in getting married in the first place.

Why women benefit from Strict Fathers

Women need Strict Father figures in their lives to protect them from themselves. I, for one, wouldn't let the women under my authority try to contact serial killers like Joran Van der Sloot with marriage offers.

And people wonder why I have the attitude I do about women.

Albert Ellis's self-help for anxiety

Albert Ellis writes that in his late teens (in the 1930's) he combined philosophical and behaviorist approaches to overcome his anxieties about public speaking and talking to girls. These experiences led to Ellis's formulation of cognitive behavioral therapy (which he called rational emotive behavior therapy) in the 1950's:



Yet circa 1990, Star Trek: The Next Generation, set in the 24th Century, portrays Reginald Barclay's anxiety disorder as something he couldn't easily improve, despite 400 years of scientific and medical progress, not to mention the survival of the philosophical traditions Ellis studied which originated in the Axial Age!

Oh, if only my parents had felt that way about sex.

I probably would have turned out better as an adult:



However, in the alternate universe where I had a rational upbringing, my self-actualization still wouldn't have given me control over what women decided to do about me.

Well, duh?

A blogger at Futurisms who attended the recent H+ Summit (which I didn't attend) finds it astounding that it drew such, well, human, participants:

The human transhumanist
As struck me at last year’s Singularity Summit, all of these conversations reminded me of just how human are the transhumanists and their proceedings. Throughout all of this, I was struck by the contrasts between their pristine vision and the earthliness of their lives. There was, first of all, the mundanity of the conference itself. There was running into Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey in the men’s room. There was Kurzweil, spry and ruddy, his face part anticipatory, part fatigued, distractedly checking his e-mail as he stood a few feet away from me waiting to take the stage and deliver a speech that has clearly become routine. There was a conference organizer plugging his iPod into the sound system during a break and playing, of all lofty things, Fleetwood Mac.

There was sharing burritos, salads, sandwiches, and conversation at an Au Bon Pain over the lunch break with several conference presenters and organizers. When I noted how funny it was that we still had to take time at a transhumanist conference to eat, there was an organizer who agreed that, indeed, we still haven’t solved the problem of sustenance. (Don’t you like eating?, I asked. Yeah, he said, but I like learning and improving myself more, and I could be spending my time doing that.) There was watching conference presenters mingle about the beer party, looking with a hint of nervousness for someone to talk to. There was the sheer enjoyment everyone clearly took in interacting face-to-face with members of a movement usually connected only online, with hanging around someone’s cool workspace garage, munching barbecue and glugging beer and getting to talk to luminaries and leaders, and even being pleasantly surprised to discover that people they disagree with are nice and personable but just have different ideas.

Of course, these are all very ordinary human aspects of just about any conference. But the strange thing is that this particular conference and its attendees are devoted to doing away with this sort of humanity. Perhaps not all the conferencegoers — maybe some of them endorse only intermediate stages of enhancement. But the posthuman world of beings who don’t need to eat, drink, travel, engage in the trials of conversation, experience the peculiar anxieties and joys of attempting to know another person, or participate in anything that at all stinks of the everyday — that world is not one in which any of the experiences had at the conference could occur, or in which the concepts we use to understand them could even retain any coherence or meaning.

It’s hard to believe the conferencegoers and I could both inhabit the same world, both seem to discern the same pleasures in it, and yet they want it to end. There are greater joys to be had, I know they will say, over the horizon — a grab-bag of every fulfilled wish you could dream of. But it’s hard to believe they really understand clearly what those are, and just what it would and wouldn’t be like if they got them.

Of course, it doesn't follow from the possibilities of new experiences that we'll necessarily abandon older ones as uninteresting -- unless the new experiences display supernormal stimuli, I suppose. I've read of cases where men have died from depletion after getting caught up in computer games which made them oblivious to their bodily needs; this would have sounded like science fiction 20 years ago. I get the impression that the Twilight fad also displays characteristics of supernormali stimuli; it seems to obsess many young women at the expense of having relationships with real boyfriends, though presumably the reality principle will reassert itself as these women mature and realize that fictional vampires can't inseminate their declining stock of eggs.

As for paradoxical conferences in general, the goals of the people who attended the H+ Summit don't sound any stranger than the goals of people who attend libertarian conferences about abolishing the state, even though these people have benefited from state interventions into the economy*; or the goals of progressives and environmentalists who attend conferences about nationalizing or heavily regulating private companies for some greater good, even though they've benefited from the products and services sold by these companies. (Look at all the people who flew in jets to the global warming summit in Copenhagen last year, for example. Shouldn't the ones from overseas have gotten there in sailing ships to stay "carbon neutral"?)

* Like libertarians from Western Europe who've grown up a few centimeters taller than Americans because the governments in their home countries have invested resources into improving the health of pregnant women and children. I see European tourists in their 20's occasionally, and from their stature alone I can usually guess they came from some developed social democracy, even before they open their mouths. Social democracy has written itself on their bodies.

I do often see women as "icky" and "weird."

They tend to fall into an uncanny valley for me, as Bernie Zilbergeld writes:

The servility economy has less and less to commend it as time passes.

A New York Times article about the postponed maturity of young adults in our culture credits the servility economy as a cause:

The stretched-out walk to independence is rooted in social and economic shifts that started in the 1970s, including a change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy that sent many more people to college, and the women’s movement, which opened up educational and professional opportunities.

Because servility work doesn't address any real need, unlike, say, plumbing work when your toilet backs up, people who have to enter the servility economy to find work really have no organic function to perform. This probably accounts for why it takes them so long to get established in life these days; they have to find patrons willing to accept them as clients. The kid who got a job at the widget factory right out of high school didn't face those sort of challenges.

I also suspect that we fucked ourselves in the Deepwater Horizon mess when we discarded the industrial base in exchange for a servility economy. Not only do we not have the industrial capacity to build the equipment we need to deal with this well; but we've also lost the tacit knowledge in older generations of engineers who've long since retired or died without training enough replacements. Instead we see the poster boy of the servility economy getting on TV with his cargo cultism about how he intends to solve it, while making the corporate malefactor pay.

Can someone explain what this means?

Not the way I envisioned "Atlas Shrugged."

I think a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged deserves a "Sky Captain" treatment, involving a lot of CGI work in post production. Make the heroes' faces look stylized, literally in the way Rand describes them in her novel. For example, Rand introduces Dagny Taggart, her beautiful Gentile alter ego, by writing, "Her face was made of angular planes. . ." She describes the other heroes' faces similarly.

By contrast, she often describes the villains' faces as "shapeless." So in post production, make their faces fall into the Uncanny Valley to evoke the revulsion against "evil" Rand wanted to portray. Rand apparently considered religious, collectivist, altruistic, family-oriented people ("the folks next door," she sneered) as less than human according to her standards, so it would make sense to show them on film in ways which convey her repugnance against them.

WTF????

I wonder if they got the idea from Will McIntosh's story "Bridesicle" (pdf).

I also detect a possible Leykis influence, since Leykis says that men's value rises as we age, while women's value (in a sexual sense) declines. So,naturally, it would make sense for the man to experience life in real time, while preserving his girlfriend in a nonaging state for future companionship once he reaches a higher status. She might find that agreeable as well.

This video also reminds me of Heinlein's novel The Door Into Summer. Only that novel involves an adult man who falls in love with a prepubescent girl and uses suspended animation and time travel in a complicated way to make their rendezvous possible without the man's having to wait around for the girl to become legally fuckable.

A possible factor in the crisis of secular humanism

I've read a little about the problems surrounding the Center for Inquiry (CFI) and its alienation of Paul Kurtz from the organization. Apparently a wealthy donor sided with Kurtz and stopped supplying CFI with a huge wad of cash he or she gave every year which provided for most of its budget.

The first lesson for a cause organization: Do what you have to do to diversify your sources of income so that you don't become overly dependent on one donor. I've heard that Alcor has that problem, which worries some cryonicists I know because of rumors that this donor plans to start his own cryonics organization and will probably cut off money to Alcor when he has the competitor up and running.

But I've suspected that the crisis in secular humanism happened at this time because of a deeper problem: Humanism doesn't provide a sufficient motivation to live in the face of Deepwater Horizon. Despite humanist propaganda about the power of man's mind, our puny reason cannot find a way to cap the Deepwater Horizon well and stop its contamination of the Gulf of Mexico. Humanists just say that we should accept Deepwater Horizon as an existential reality; learn to live with it through philosophy, literature and humor; and dismiss technological efforts to defeat Deepwater Horizon as "denial," "false hope," "poorly informed techno-utopian speculation," etc.

Many religions, by contrast, promise an alternative reality where Deepwater Horizon doesn't exist and people can enjoy the Gulf in its pristine form forever. How can humanism compete with that?

Humor aside, however, I've felt for about 20 years now that humanism has failed to gain market share as a world view in the U.S. precisely because humanists have repudiated the idea of a technological effort to conquer aging and death, despite their rhetoric in other contexts which praises human intelligence and the accomplishments of science and engineering. They share this fault with their niche competitors, the Objectivists.* If humanists feel that their world view needs some kind of rebranding to make it interesting, exciting and competitive again, they should seriously consider dumping their traditional death apologetics and look into what cryonicists have advocated for nearly 50 years.

Of course that leaves me open to the objection that I recommend that a relatively unsuccessful social movement (humanism) join forces with another one even less successful (cryonics). I admit that I advocate this out of self interest: I hope that the convergence of the two movements would improve cryonics' position in society, for example by bringing in several thousand more sign ups, getting more useful expertise (not "skepticism") to work on cryonics' problems, and of course strengthening cryonics organizations financially. I also conjecture that we might see some virtuous synergy between the two movements, especially if cryonicists' perspective gives humanism the missing piece it needs to thrive again as a socially effective creed.

Cryonicists' own stories often start out with accounts of religious doubts which leave existential needs unfulfilled, and then the discovery of the cryonics idea which offers the hope of meeting these needs (though I would call cryonics more of a rational gamble or judgment about the capabilities of future medicine than "hope"). Why wouldn't integrating cryonicists' thinking into humanism benefit both groups?

* One of the recent biographies about Ayn Rand argues that her philosophy created a space on the right for atheistic, secular or Jewish conservatives who didn't feel comfortable around Christian conservatives like William F. Buckley.

Stressful week end

In addition to the problem with my right eye, the man who runs the trail ride business on the Creekside property, Charles Goens, who goes by the name Cat, apparently broke up with his girlfriend, took some firearms and rode off on one of his horses into the sticks after announcing that he planned to kill himself.

Someone called the sheriff, and a couple of Yavapai County deputies came by the Creekside and waited for Cat in the parking lot, but he wouldn't talk to them on his cell phone. I tried calling him instead, but he wouldn't answer. Around 10 PM (22:00), however, Cat called me on my cell phone to say that he had shot himself in the liver, and he sounded in genuine distress. I ran out to the parking lot, handed my phone to one of the deputies, and they got some information about how to find him.

As of the time of writing this, I don't know the outcome.

I do want to take another phone call like that, ever.

The New York Times legitimizes the word I coined.

Apparently The New York Times considers "singularitarian" a real word now. An article about Ray Kurzweil, his fans and Singularity University uses it in a context which suggests that it has a self-evident or inferable meaning:

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.

Despite such optimism, some Singularitarians aren’t all that fond of Mr. Kurzweil.

I can tell from the comments on this article that the Singularitarians have some work to do to improve their public image, for example, by coming up with solutions to the kinds of problems ordinary people understand and can relate to instead of all the talk about merging with superintelligent machines. However, one example in the article underwhelmed me as a fruit of Singularitarian thinking:

Devin Fidler, a former student [of Singularity University?], is in the midst of securing funding for a company that will build a portable machine that squirts out a cement-like goop that allows builders to erect an entire house, layer by layer. Such technology could almost eliminate labor costs and bring better housing to low-income areas.

Mr. Fidler didn't need to read The Singularity Is Near or go to Singularity University to come up with that idea. How many issues of, say, Popular Science or Popular Mechanics over the decades have featured stories about some garage inventor who patented a similar process, well before the Singularity idea got into circulation?

I also get the impression that Singularitarianism doesn't address the underlying social, political and economic causes of a lot of our problems. I'd like to see technological progress which empowers ordinary people to become less dependent on governmental nannyism and the political redistribution of incomes, for example in the area of affordable health care. By contrast, the Singularitarian approach to health care displays a bias towards expensive products for high-income people like the technology entrepreneurs drawn to the Singularity idea. Kurzweil himself apparently sees physicians several times a month.

Humanist propaganda in art criticism

Noting the contrast between classical pagan and Christian themes in Robert L. Feigen's art collection:

Martyrs: Roasted, Beheaded or Maimed

Two 17th-century paintings by the same artist, each depicting a comely, partly naked woman, welcome viewers to “Italian Paintings From the Richard L. Feigen Collection,” a high-quality exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery here. One, by Orazio Gentileschi from around 1628, is a run-of-the-mill depiction of the penitent Mary Magdalene, half reclining on her side on the cold floor of a shadowy cave. A dark orange blanket covers her legs and lower torso, leaving her breasts and shoulders exposed. Leaning with one elbow on a large, open book, her long hair flowing over its pages and a skull nestled under her arm, she gazes heavenward with a pious, melancholy expression.

The other painting, “Danaë and the Shower of Gold,” made by Gentileschi six years earlier, is a knockout. Based on the same cartoon that Gentileschi later used for the Magdalene, the heroine reclines not on stony ground but on a comfy pillow and a mattress covered by a white sheet whose folds and wrinkles are rendered with a veracity that a modern Photorealist would envy. Her brightly illuminated body, whose nether parts are barely covered by a bit of diaphanous gold fabric, is similarly realized with a loving eye for the subtlest curve, bulge and dimple. She looks up and gestures in the same direction with one arm, not to any Christian deity but to a magic rain of gold coins falling toward her. A cupid with feathery wings rises on his knees from the heaped folds of a gold counterpane, arms raised in delight at the miraculous golden downpour. . .

You can see why secular humanism, inspired by the pagan cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, was bound to triumph over the authoritarian, otherworldly, sado-masochistic mysticism of medieval Christianity.

Or else you could just view Danaë and Mary Magdalene as the same woman in different stages of her life. Gentileschi interprets Ovid's myth about Danaë in a way which suggests that Zeus paid her for putting out for him. She should have saved and invested those gold coins so that she wouldn't have to become a Christian and live in a cave after she lost her sexual desirability.

Getting back to the gratuitous comment however, I wouldn't assume any permanent "triumph" of secular humanism if, as seems likely, societies develop more in a drunkard's walk fashion than in some inevitable direction called "progress."

Though as I've noticed in the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, skeptics who compare technological inevitabilism to a religion seem to convert when something sufficiently dire backs them to the wall and they demand that someone comes up with an engineering solution to protect them from it. We haven't gotten to the point yet where we dismiss capping Deepwater Horizon as a "false hope," "techno-utopian speculation," "denial" and other pejoratives applied to proposals to conquer aging and death through technological means.

Vision problem

I had to make an emergency visit to an ophthalmologist today, on a Saturday. I had a leaky or "occluded" vein in my right eye, and I may have to live with some subtle vision loss in that eye from now on.

I'll also have to find ways to lower my blood pressure, and I suspect I have type 2 diabetes as well. I plan to attack these issues aggressively.

While the eye problem per se doesn't threaten my life, it signals more serious health problems down the line. And people wonder why we cryonicists feel dissatisfied with our biological limitations.

Transhumanism doesn't mean "mind uploading."

I've recently discovered a blog critical of transhumanist ideas, and I happen to agree with some of the criticisms I've read so far, though with reservations.

For example, a recent post argues against mind uploading by by pointing out the dualistic assumption behind the idea. The author claims that mind uploading advocates, who abjure supernaturalism, just sneak the "soul" idea back in under a different name.

Fair enough, though I get the impression that the author displays a naturalistic bias against the existence of "souls." What if "souls" with the classical attributes do in fact exist in a form which a Sufficiently Advanced Technology (SAT) could transfer from human brains into computers? If, instead, the author finds mind uploading objectionable because it mixes entities from nonoverlapping metaphysical realms -- supernatural souls and natural SAT's -- yet he believes in the existence of both, then his objection puzzles me. Wouldn't he want mind uploading advocates to believe in "souls," even if they've formulated a heretical doctrine about them?

I would add I don't understand how transhumanists of the mind uploading school who also hold Buddhist beliefs can handle the cognitive dissonance. I don't see how you can believe in "no-self," yet expect an uploading process to have something to upload which would maintain its continuity of identity.

However, despite the author's opinion, it doesn't follow from his critique of mind uploading that "transhumanism won't work," because transhumanism predates the mind uploading idea. Transhumanism also doesn't equal eugenics, another confused criticism of the idea you find in the bioconservative literature. Hans Moravec, who has a background in robotics but not neuroscience, arrived relatively late on the scene when he popularized the mind uploading idea around 1990.

Yet I got my exposure to That '70's Transhumanism through Robert Ettinger's 1972 nonfiction book Man Into Superman, which I read in paperback in 1974. Ettinger, who has masters degrees in both physics and mathematics, grounds his speculations about "immortal superman" in the scientific literature of the time (which puts his work into a somewhat better category than F.M. Esfandiary's from around the same period). New Scientist magazine even gave his book a favorable review the year it came out.

Yet you don't find the idea of mind uploading in this book, whereas you do find an exploration of other possibilities for human enhancement which still sound radical even in 2010, but based on biology and engineering. Man Into Superman remains strangely neglected today, even though Ettinger anticipated many of the ideas which re-emerged, without giving him proper credit, in the Extropian and transhumanist movements during the 1990-2010 decades.

If bioconservatives want to criticize transhumanist ideas, I certainly encourage them to do so; I've done my share of that as well. But at least try to do your homework about them first by reading the background literature dating back several decades, something that I wish cryonics' critics would bother to do as well instead of spreading their ignorant misconceptions about cryonics on the internet.

The two Roberts as "middlebrow utopian writers"

I read this book a few years ago, which has a chapter about the influence of Robert Rimmer and Robert Heinlein on the sexual revolution in the 1960's:



Apparently Rimmer had a spouse-sharing arrangement in his private life which worked well and led to his writing The Harrad Experiment to encourage others to follow his example. So, naturally, I wonder if Heinlein had something similar going on in his private life which provided material for his published stories about polyamorous situations. According to the examples cited in this book, some of Heinlein's readers followed his written prescription, whether or not that reflected his own practice.

Heinlein's novels have certainly influenced the future-oriented world views of many cryonicists, as Tiffany Romain notes. (You can see an example on Alcor's website.) Given what I've heard about some cryonicists' sex lives, I suspect that Heinlein's influence might extend to that area as well.

"The Harrad Experiment" film adaptation, 1973

I lived in coed dorms at Washington University in St. Louis from the fall semester 1978 through the fall semester of 1979. (I spent the summer of 1979 with my parents in Tulsa.) Nothing cool like this happened there, though I met some intelligent and attractive coeds, and I discovered that I found Jewish girls interesting.

The coeds at the University of Tulsa, by contrast, disgusted me.

Given what I know now, I probably should have hung out with the art student girls at Wash U instead of the science majors.

The WRONGEST introduction to a familiar TV show I've ever seen.

Daniel Boone in Spanish?

The "getting lucky" planet for Starfleet's teenage boys?

I remember seeing this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, titled "Justice," during its original broadcast, back when I lived in Oklahoma. At the time I joked that it showed "the Planet of the Californians," before I moved to California and saw how many frumpy white people lived in that state, not to mention all the Mexicans and Asians.



I watched part of it again last night, and its probably unintentional radicalness struck me: Invite the teenage boy Wesley Crusher with the Away Team down to a planet where the adults on the Enterprise, including Wesley's mother, know that the natives engage in promiscuous and public sex? And then let him run off unchaperoned with a pretty teenage girl who shares her society's hedonistic values?

What a cool mom! The fictional Wesley had it about as good as the cryonicist's teen son whose polyamorous father, so I've heard, arranged for the boy's sexual debut with his mistress. Only Wesley got into trouble with the local authorities before he had a sexual opportunity on this planet.

In other words, this episode teases its male fans with a utopian sexual fantasy, but to avoid the controversy caused by the anxieties many parents feel about their children's emerging sexuality, it doesn't allow Wesley to follow through with possibly his first sexual adventure. This episode, and the similar utopias in fiction like Brave New World, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Harrad Experiment, make me wonder about the parallel life I could have had in a sexually rational environment, instead of the one I grew up in. The "sexual revolution" I read about in books and magazines as a teen apparently didn't exist in Tulsa in the 1970's.

Over-optimism about conquering aging in the late 1970's

This article published in 1978 mentions two cryonicists I know of: Paul Segall and Saul Kent:



"Paul Segall of the University of California's biology department thinks we could do it [conquer aging] in five years with $200 million [in late 1970's dollars] and international cooperation."

And, of course, 32 years after the publication of this article, Segall's brain apparently resides in a cryogenic dewar somewhere, with no cure for aging in sight. If the scientists mentioned in this article had put more effort into brain cryopreservation, they might have produced something to show for their efforts which could have done them some good in their own cryonic suspensions.

Sends the wrong message about cryonics, don't you think?

I just got my copy of the July 2010 of Life Extension magazine, and I noticed this ad from Alcor just inside the back cover, which I tore out and scanned:



I think this sends the wrong message about cryonics, considering that we want to integrate cryostasis into mainstream health care eventually. Modern medicine doesn't frame its mission as giving you the opportunity to "relive your life differently," only as giving you, to the best of its ability, the opportunity to live longer than you would otherwise, and preferably in reasonably good health. Whether you choose to live "differently" after benefiting from a medical intervention to extend your life remains your business, not your health care provider's.

This sort of advertising also exposes Alcor to potential legal problems. Alcor shouldn't claim in print that ultra-cold temperatures "preserve human life," because it can't establish that it does so, given our current ignorance. (I'd like to see aggressive research to reduce that ignorance as much as feasible with current technology.)

Apparently "skepticism" can mean "learned helplessness."

Martin Seligman, years before he went into the positive psychology hustle, did some useful work in what psychologists call "learned helplessness." Wikipedia defines it as:

a technical term in animal psychology and related human psychology, means a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

Keep this definition in mind while I make what seems like an irrelevant change of subject.

I haven't studied the Deepwater Horizon crisis obsessively, but I have noticed through it all that everyone assumes that technological solutions to putting a valve on the oil volcano under the Gulf of Mexico must exist, and they therefore demand that someone, not necessarily BP's engineers and contractors, discovers and implements one of these solutions. Apparently thousands of individuals have even offered unsolicited solutions of their own, in a kind of spontaneous crowdsourcing effort to help BP. No one I know of has said that we should instead accept the oil volcano and resulting contaminated Gulf as an existential reality, and learn to deal with it the best we can through religion, literature and humor, as Michael Shermer might say about an analogous subject, despite the recurring terror we would experience from Deepwater Horizon salience.

In other words, people feel a sense of technological efficacy about dealing with this threat to the Gulf's ecosystem and its human residents' livelihoods, and they expect scientists, engineers and inventors to get results in controlling it. The failures so far haven't conditioned us to a state of learned helplessness, "a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation," regarding Deepwater Horizon. I respect this display of strength in our culture; despite evidence of a loss of nerve in other areas, when something backs us to the wall, we still invoke the Enlightenment's confidence in man's mind to find ways to protect us from it.

So I wonder why this confidence hasn't extended to the "transhumanist" goal of conquering aging and death through technological means. I read recently one transhumanist writer's confession of "skepticism" about our ability to solve this other problem; but in context he really means that he's surrendered to learned helplessness about it, when we have feasible "restored opportunities" for working our way out of aging and death. He wouldn't dismiss the Deepwater Horizon efforts as "techno-utopian speculation," given the difficulties of the task and the payoffs from its success; yet he and similar advocates of "skepticism" = learned helplessness do exactly that towards scientifically informed proposals for radical life extension.

By "restored opportunities," I have in mind the fact that the cryonics proposal makes empirically testable claims which we can examine in real time, and it allows for improvements in brain cryopreservation which we can apply in the here-and-now without postulating some eschatechnological gimmick in Future World. This gives it an advantage over claims of imminent breakthroughs in anti-aging, like the nonsensical predictions from 20th Century "futurists" that we'd have 400 year life expectancies by now. (Uh, hello? We won't know that until someone can document he or she has lived 400 years, which I can guarantee won't happen for the next three centuries, at the earliest.)

As Thomas Donaldson (now apparently in cryostasis) wrote a few years ago, anti-aging research in humans faces the problem that we already live way longer than the animals we use for our experiments, so we don't have a time-efficient way of learning what works in our species; and on top of that, efforts to control human aging might meet social and political opposition for complicated reasons, including the unwillingness to see aging as a disease.

By contrast, Donaldson writes:

The major and important difference between cryonics and antiaging comes from the simple fact that discovery of methods to preserve our living brains avoids the scientific problems in the study of aging completely. Of course suspension, too, involves lots of scientific problems. Still, none of them involve work which will necessarily use up time. A lifespan experiment on mice requires at least 3 years. A cryobiological experiment testing a modified preservation method takes no more than a week at most. Neither antiaging nor cryonics meet with lots of social approval, so funding will be low (but still nonzero) for both fields. However cryobiology can progress much faster than antiaging. Not only that, but its progress almost totally lacks the problems of proving that an advance has happened. The state of a brain, or even a section of brain, after vitrification and rewarming to normal temperature, shows directly whether or not the method used improved on previous methods.

That doesn't sound like learned helplessness to me. I see the wisdom in Donaldson's analysis, so I have donated money towards a small project to improve brain cryopreservation. I wish I could give more details, but the recipients want to keep their work low-profile for now.

If you view aging and death as analogues to Deepwater Horizon, much more dangerous but apparently much harder to solve, then the lack of success in solving them so far does not justify a response of learned helplessness labeled as "skepticism." We would laugh at apologetics applied towards accepting an oily Gulf of Mexico when we assume we can produce a better outcome, so why do we accept similar apologetics about aging and death?

The absence of 20th Century psychotherapy in the Star Trek franchise

Last night I watched part of this episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation, featuring the occasional character Reginald Barclay, played by Dwight Schultz, who suffers from a chronic anxiety disorder:



The anomaly of seeing someone with this problem in a "futuristic" setting (the 24th Century CE?) struck me, much like the other anomalies, for example, Captain Picard's baldness (Rogaine from the 20th Century didn't work?), and the fact that the characters still age and die.

Behavior therapists like Joseph Wolpe published studies showing that they discovered effective treatments for inappropriate anxiety in the middle of the 20th Century, along with cognitive therapists like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. The two camps eventually married their complementary approaches to create cognitive behavioral therapy. We also have "folk therapies" for anxiety based on meditation, religious beliefs and practices, philosophical world views like Stoicism and so forth.

And that doesn't even begin to cover the pharmaceutical approaches to managing anxiety, including attempts at self-medication with substances like alcohol, marijuana and MDMA.

According to my layman's understanding of behaviorism, anxiety arises from acquiring dysfunctional conditioned responses in certain situations. Psychotherapeutic approaches try to change the conditioning, including how you think about these situations which contribute to your anxiety.

So, for example, if asking women out for dates makes you anxious, one, you have to keep practicing it as a social skill until the anxiety subsides, regardless of the outcome (I think behaviorists use the term "extinction" for this phenomenon); and two, you have to change the way you think about rejection, which means disputing your irrational beliefs about rejection through critical thinking and humor. (As I've joked about the women who've rejected me, "Well, she must suffer from low self-esteem!") In that respect, cognitive behavioral therapy has more in common with certain schools of philosophy and other wisdom traditions than with psychoanalysis.

The drugs also help to some extent if you use them as part of the extinction process. Your Xanax prescription, for example, reduces the feeling of anxiety you would otherwise experience in certain situations, so if you plan your exposure to these situations carefully with the help of a therapist trained in cognitive behavioral techniques, you can unlearn the conditioning which made you anxious in the first place.

Now, why don't we see any of this reasonably effective 20th Century psychotherapy in the Star Trek franchise to help disturbed characters manage their emotions better? Instead of that, Barclay acts out his fantasy life as a confident man in the Holodeck to compensate for his inadequacies outside the Holodeck, talks to the useless Counselor Troi and generally doesn't get much better except by accident. Given what psychotherapy and pharmacology can do now for anxiety in our mysterious, far-future year 2010, what could they accomplish for someone like Barclay in the 24th Century era of Picard's Enterprise?* The show could at least have postulated special Holodeck programs to present Barclay with simulations of realistic situations, like talking to a pretty girl in a bar who politely turns down his request to go on a date with him, where he could learn how to adapt to adversity in real life more effectively.

In a way, these anomalies don't surprise me. The Trek franchise has projected conflicting beliefs all along. Gene Roddenberry famously wanted Trek to present his vision of a humanist utopia, but he had to work with people in Hollywood who wanted the show to go in other directions, especially after Roddenberry died, or who just didn't care about the show's message because to them cranking out a TV series meant they got paychecks. (And by the late 1990's, some real technologies had surpassed the fictional technologies in the Trek universe. The latter episodes of Star Trek: Voyager didn't mention a "Galaxy Wide Web," for example.)

So, for example, Picard gives a speech in numerous episodes about how humanity by the 24th Century had moved beyond some behavior like greed, ethnocentrism or whatever, while at the same time the series shows humans still behaving in stupid ways, like Barclay's ineffective responses to his anxiety disorder when he had the mental health resources of Starfleet at his disposal (unless his insurance didn't cover treatment!). The series wouldn't have worked with modern audiences if it showed too-perfect characters, so for story-telling purposes it made the regular characters only moderately flawed, but well behaved by current norms, and created drama by having them interact with deeply flawed characters like Barclay.

But admit it: Wouldn't you like to see the episode where Will Riker gets drunk on real alcohol for once, goes to Troi's quarters and slaps her around for dumping him, like people living in a trailer park? That would reflect real human behavior a lot more than the antiseptic restraint the characters normally show around each another.

* Science fiction writers have long expressed concerns about the abuse of applied psychology in Future World. Aldous Huxley wrote one of the best known examples, but the worry also shows up in lesser but worthy authors like H. Beam Piper. In Little Fuzzy, Piper writes disapprovingly:

In a moment, the screen flickered and cleared, and a young man looked out of it, with the momentary upward glance of one who wants to make sure his public face is on straight. It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face—the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.

Piper could have described the regular characters in the various Trek incarnations.

John Horgan says something rational about Buddhism.

John Horgan, best known as an advocate of the "end of science" idea and limits to our ability to penetrate the hard mysteries, criticized Buddhism a few years ago, articulating some of the problems I've noticed in it.

Horgan says that Buddhism still assumes a form of theism, even if its version sounds less absurd than the kind Western humanists reject:

For many, a chief selling point of Buddhism is its supposed de-emphasis of supernatural notions such as immortal souls and God. Buddhism "rejects the theological impulse," the philosopher Owen Flanagan declares approvingly in The Problem of the Soul. Actually, Buddhism is functionally theistic, even if it avoids the "G" word. Like its parent religion Hinduism, Buddhism espouses reincarnation, which holds that after death our souls are re-instantiated in new bodies, and karma, the law of moral cause and effect. Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.

Horgan also calls bullshit on meditation and the Buddhist doctrine of anatta:

The insights imputed to meditation are questionable, too. Meditation, the brain researcher Francisco Varela told me before he died in 2001, confirms the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, which holds that the self is an illusion. Varela contended that anatta has also been corroborated by cognitive science, which has discovered that our perception of our minds as discrete, unified entities is an illusion foisted upon us by our clever brains. In fact, all that cognitive science has revealed is that the mind is an emergent phenomenon, which is difficult to explain or predict in terms of its parts; few scientists would equate the property of emergence with nonexistence, as anatta does.

I would add that the Buddhist argument commits the fallacy of composition. A reductionist explanation of X, in this case the self, in terms of its components not sharing X's essential properties, doesn't make X an "illusion."

Moreover, how much does anatta depend on the fact that humans minds currently don't last very long? I wonder whether Buddhists would find human minds more substantial if we could radically extend individuals' healthy life expectancy.

Horgan then knocks the alleged psychological and moral benefits of Buddhist "enlightenment," which Sam Harris, using his skin-crawling "empathy" speak, later emphasized in his writings as an alternative to Abrahamic "spirituality":

Much more dubious is Buddhism's claim that perceiving yourself as in some sense unreal will make you happier and more compassionate. Ideally, as the British psychologist and Zen practitioner Susan Blackmore writes in The Meme Machine, when you embrace your essential selflessness, "guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, and fear of failure ebb away and you become, contrary to expectation, a better neighbor." But most people are distressed by sensations of unreality, which are quite common and can be induced by drugs, fatigue, trauma, and mental illness as well as by meditation.

Even if you achieve a blissful acceptance of the illusory nature of your self, this perspective may not transform you into a saintly bodhisattva, brimming with love and compassion for all other creatures. Far from it—and this is where the distance between certain humanistic values and Buddhism becomes most apparent. To someone who sees himself and others as unreal, human suffering and death may appear laughably trivial. This may explain why some Buddhist masters have behaved more like nihilists than saints. Chogyam Trungpa, who helped introduce Tibetan Buddhism to the United States in the 1970s, was a promiscuous drunk and bully, and he died of alcohol-related illness in 1987. Zen lore celebrates the sadistic or masochistic behavior of sages such as Bodhidharma, who is said to have sat in meditation for so long that his legs became gangrenous.

What's worse, Buddhism holds that enlightenment makes you morally infallible—like the pope, but more so. Even the otherwise sensible James Austin perpetuates this insidious notion. " 'Wrong' actions won't arise," he writes, "when a brain continues truly to express the self-nature intrinsic to its [transcendent] experiences." Buddhists infected with this belief can easily excuse their teachers' abusive acts as hallmarks of a "crazy wisdom" that the unenlightened cannot fathom.

And Horgan ends with:

All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.

In other words, Buddhism promotes the kind of self-centered teleological reasoning which Aspies seem less susceptible to. People in the Buddhist tradition might have stumbled across some interesting potentials or capacities of the human mind, but they've drawn wrong inferences from them, and they haven't examined their own biases as closely as they assume.

At least Buddhism does have an unusual feature in its favor: It makes empirical claims about the here-and-now which don't depend on the historicity of a Buddha, quite unlike the woo-woo claims attributed to a long-vanished, allegedly historical Jesus. Buddhism's "experiential liminality" might make it appeal to the Pirahã people in the Amazon for that reason.

From the Real Super Powers File

This power might not seem especially super, but you have to start somewhere:

Meditation Dulls Experience of Pain

People who regularly meditate apparently find pain less unpleasant, because their brains are busy focusing on the present and so anticipate the pain less, blunting its emotional impact, a new study reveals.

The ability to control your perception of pain certainly looks useful, and it falls into the category of "rare human talents," according to Bob Ettinger's classification of super powers published nearly nearly 40 years ago in his book, Man Into Superman. An improved version of this power should come with the standard-issue superhuman body of Future World.

Bob explains his view of feasible super powers as follows:

Superman does not have to be invented. We reject, as a trivial example, the "Superman" of the comics, the "man of steel" who is "more powerful than a locomotive" and "can leap tall buildings at a single bound." We reject not his banality but his dishonesty; barring super-flatulence, for example, there is no apparent way for him to alter course or maintain thrust in midair.

We likewise reject the super-powers of most heroes of science fiction, who have the magical ability to exert direct control over other minds, over matter, or over space and time-the dealers in telepathy, psychokinesis, teleportation, precognition, etc., who beat the game by changing the rules. It is true that we don't yet know all the rules, and we are probably mistaken about some we think we know; nevertheless, it is more honest, and will probably be more fruitful, if we give our superman briefly those powers that are extensions of reasonably well-established phenomena. As we shall see, this will still provide immense scope for quantitative and qualitative improvement.

Instead of inventing superman, we can assemble him. We already have examples of all the traits and abilities required for a very respectable superman indeed. New ideas will undoubtedly occur, but we need postulate no more than already exist, their sources being: (1) rare human talents, (2) talents of other species, and (3) machine talents. After this, we can build speculation on flimsier hints and clues-in fact, we must, since long-range development will surely dwarf our boldest imaginings.

In the first category, there are several subdivisions. First, there is the obvious lode of variance among men. Most races need warm beds, but the Indians of Tierra del Fuego sleep nude in a climate worse than Chicago's. Most of us just want to lie down, but now and then we notice a Jim Ryun or a Dick Fosbury. And by far the majority of men can function in bed at most once a day, but Dr. Kinsey assures us there are those who can jump in and out like jackrabbits, several times a day, week in and week out. (Or so they say.) . . . Since such capacities are known to exist, they must have some anatomical and physiological basis, which can be discovered and (eventually) duplicated by various means, including not only genetic manipulation but also treatment of the mature individual by chemistry, surgery, special virus inoculations, and other means.

This is not exactly self-evident, and it is conceivable that certain traits tend to be mutually exclusive, making it difficult for a single individual to embrace them all, even if desired; but the over-riding presumption is that, once we thoroughly understand something, we can duplicate its effects sooner or later, and even improve on them. As supermen, all of us will have the important talents of the best of us, and anyone who doesn't like the monotony can choose to remain inferior.

In the category of "rare human talents" I include not only the fairly constant talents of exceptional people, but also the occasional creative successes of more ordinary people. All of us, at times, have performed "over our heads," reaching a peak not matched before or after. There was some reason why we could do it, and it should be possible to make such ability routinely available. Again, children have certain capacities that are often gradually lost as they grow older; in particular, the young have acute senses. Their hearing everything is not just nosiness, but sharp ears; their finickiness about food is not just temperament, but sensitive taste. Still again, systems such as yoga and hypnosis seem able to unlock hidden stores of perception and control, stores which will inevitably be made public.

A little more difficult, perhaps, will be the appropriation of the skills of other species, because of the greater likelihood of incompatibility. Nevertheless, the hybridization of animals, including man, through artificial means has been predicted by competent biologists, based on work already in progress. . . If some animal is doing it, then it can be done; and if it can be done, it can scarcely be doubted that we will do it, if we wish. It is only and always a question of effort, money and time.

The third category is really bluesky, because in principle a machine can be made to do anything that is physically possible; and if we envision the human brain coupled to a machine or complex of machines-so that the machines are extensions of the person then, with only modest reservations to be noted later, we can do anything, which means we can be anything.

But today's so-called "advanced thinking" about human potentials has yet to catch up with That '70's Transhumanism, though I see signs of progress. (The happiness cult promoted by positive psychology has monopolized the conversation lately, at the expense of more visionary but evidence-based ideas.) A couple years ago the Discovery Channel ran a show titled "The Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic," profiling four people with unusual, non-woo abilities. You can see the first clip of that special below:




I'd add to this list the freakishly high intelligence displayed by youngsters like Alia Sabur.

In fairness to Jerry Leaf

I have my reservations about Jerry's action-hero persona and his contributions to cryonics, but I do respect him for wanting to live. In the interview Jerry states the following about his life in Future World:

CM: What do you plan to do if this thing really works? What are your long term goals and ambitions?

JL: To be a free man who is allowed to pursue whatever in life allows me to contribute to my wellbeing. I've done a lot of things in the life that I've already lived. I suppose the outstanding things in my own mind about my life are things that have been adventurous in one way or another. I think the things that have impressed me the most have been things which stimulated me both intellectually and physically.

I'm probably like most people who enjoy living. I like to use all my senses. I like to see things that look good, smell things that smell good and use my body and mind to the fullest.

If I wake up in the future some time and I have to get a job on the basis of what I've already done I'd probably become involved in science and technology on some level. Although I would like to have also the romance and adventure that I've already experienced on some occasions in my life -- only more of it and more lasting in the future.

CM: That surprises us a little. We figured you more as a spacedog or soldier/adventurer, solar sail ship captain. . .

JL: I was getting to that (laughter). As a soldier, as someone who has worked in secret military operations and as an assassin I would be able to get a job perhaps as a blade runner (laughter). That would be an easy one for me because that's the kind of job that by its very nature only requires a limited amount of specialized skill and capability. It mostly requires good senses, guts, and physical ability. The environment that you operate in is the only thing that requires specialized training and that can be acquired rapidly. So, yes, when I was asked the question as to what I would be in the future at one of the Tahoe meetings I said that I would like to live long enough to become an Interstellar Smuggler -- such as Han Solo of STAR WARS. That would suit my lifestyle well. Particularly if I could find a Princess Leia out there among the stardust.

So Jerry also displayed the duality Tiffany Romain notes about cryonicists, though his pre-suspension life seemed atypical if he did, in fact, work as an "assassin" in his 20's before he went on to study biology and try to advance cryonics technology. As Romain writes:

Many Americans engage in the practice of imagining the future, setting goals and working toward them and protecting against undesirable futures. Unlike other Americans, however, cryonicists imagine possibilities for their lives in a very distant future, an imagined future that is distinct from the life they intend to live until they are frozen. At the same time, cryonicists must also contend with the present, mundane, day-to-day tasks of middle-class American life in a very practical sense—making an income, managing finances, paying the life insurance bill, filing paperwork — and many of these daily, present-minded tasks make imagining such futures possible for cryonicists. While highly future-oriented, cryonics requires preparation in the present, here, and now.

Some additional observations:

Jerry states a philosophical view of death which he attributes to his action-hero past:

I left my fear of death somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam. To this day I have absolutely no fear of death, only the fear of not being able to save someone else that I care about. It's not that I don't want life for myself, because I do very much. I just don't feel anything about nonexistence. I only have the positive feeling towards life. I want more of it.

So much for the "fear of death" motivation attributed to cryonicists. Not wanting to die does not necessarily equal fearing to die.

Jerry also pursued the academic study of philosophy in college, earning a B.A. in philosophy before going on to study biology at a graduate level. Normally young people who major in philosophy leave themselves open to the criticism that they lack the life experience to get much value from philosophy, so they wasted their time in studying it; but if we can accept Jerry's presentation of himself as a Hemingway-ish sort of character who already had an adventure-filled and sanguinary life before he went to college, somehow his study of philosophy seems fitting as an organic stage in his self-development. I wonder if Jerry read Stoic works as part of his education, like James Stockdale.

More evidence for my Asperger's self-diagnosis

Somehow this story doesn't surprise me:

People with Asperger's less likely to see purpose behind the events in their lives

Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering. . . , she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.

I tend to think that way myself. For example, the idea that we got here through "random chance," a proposition which disturbs many neurotypicals, has never bothered me.

Frankly I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise about the process of making babies, with the possible exception of the ones conceived artificially in the lab; though people who believe in creationist or teleological explanations of babies usually don't have in vitro fertilizations in mind when they talk about "intelligent design." Humans engage in random, haphazard and frequently mentally impaired fucking (for example, thanks to alcohol), and conceptions often result from the sloppy business. I don't see why a given baby's conception had to "unfold in a particular way," much less where a god had to intervene in its organic development.

I also don't believe in the teleological view of meeting a "significant other," though my mother apparently did. Thirty years ago she told me that I would find Her some day, though perhaps not for several years because of Her minority at the time; I had to wait for Her to grow up first. In the context of my family history, this made sense to my mother because both of my grandfathers married women (who became my grandmothers) 10-12 years younger than them, about the same age difference between my father and mother. The family tradition might explain my interest in the health effects on men who marry significantly younger women.

Jerry Leaf, cryonics' action hero

Or so Jerry wanted us to believe.

I moved from Oklahoma to Southern California in January 1991, and I got to talk to Jerry Leaf a couple of times, briefly, before he had a heart attack and went into cryonic suspension in July 1991. I saw him last at a party in the Pizers' home in Wrightwood literally the week end before that happened. He became the first person I had met who went into cryostasis.

So I can't say that I really knew Jerry. Perhaps that gives me the ability to examine his story with weaker biases, or at least different biases, based on what I've read and heard about him.

I've learned that I can't always accept cryonicists' self-representations at face value; sometimes I discern things about them at odds with their advertising once I get to know them better. (As Dave Pizer says, cryonics attracts a lot of "four-flushers.") While I didn't have the opportunity to improve my acquaintance with Jerry, at least in the current life cycle, I do have some questions about Jerry Leaf's mythology, based mainly on the interview he gave for Alcor's magazine in 1986.

First of all, Jerry claimed he had a background as a kind of special forces guy for the U.S. in Southeast Asia in the early 1960's:

My motivations go back to the beginnings of the 1960's. They began in the jungles of Southeast Asia. I was involved in a special operations group deployed out of Western Europe. We were assigned a highly sensitive mission in South Vietnam, the kind that were eventually handled by special teams called Phoenix Groups. We were further used as a test case for operations across the border into North Vietnam. Part of what we learned was used to develop what became known as MACV-SOG, a top secret organization involving the South Vietnamese and American Special Forces and the CIA in mid 1964. It was during these missions into North Vietnam that our casualty rate began to rise, eventually exceeding 50% before our return to Western Europe.

Jerry might have actually done these things, like a Hollywood action hero. But I don't know how to verify any of this. He could have had a more mundane military career, and then embellished it afterwards to impress people, especially women, with the advantage that an uncheckable lie about his past could look indistinguishable from a genuine secret kept in the name of national security. Ex-military people have done this fairly often, like the retired Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso with his preposterous tale in the 1990's about handling wreckage from a crashed alien spaceship recovered from Roswell, New Mexico.

Leaf then claimed:

When I came back (we were quietly reinserted into Germany after the Southeast Asian operations) and I was cycled back to the US for a period of time (during which time I was involved in additional covert operations here)

What "additional covert operations" in the United States in the 1960's? Some months after Jerry's suspension, one of his friends hinted to me that Jerry said he had a hand in political assassinations in the 1960's. So, did Jerry tell his friends that he, instead of Lee Harvey Oswald, really shot President Kennedy from the Grassy Knoll or something?

I also have a question about Jerry's ability to buy medical equipment from UCLA for use at Alcor in the 1980's. Apparently when the Riverside County authorities raided Alcor's facility as part of their investigation into Dora Kent's death, they confiscated items which still had UCLA's identification plates on them, suspected theft, contacted the UCLA police and left the equipment's ownership in limbo until Alcor and Jerry's business Cryovita proved they purchased most of it through receipts.

Fair enough. I have no reason to think Jerry stole anything. Jerry, who reportedly worked at the "Thoracic Surgery Research laboratory of UCLA Medical Center with Dr. Gerald Buckberg," would naturally know how to buy such medical surplus. But did he exert some kind of undue influence on the people who decided what to put up for sale, and at what prices, so that he could acquire things which he wouldn't normally have access to?

As for Jerry's contributions to cryonics, now long past, I wonder why I don't hear much about those today, like references to a "Leaf procedure" during suspensions. I admit I write this out of ignorance. I haven't studied the nuts and bolts of doing suspensions, so I don't know what Alcor does today which derives from Jerry's experiments in the 1980's. I wonder if his accomplishments just might not seem that substantial with two decades' hindsight.

I don't draw attention to these apparent anomalies out of hostility to Jerry. Like I said, I didn't know him apart from a couple of brief conversations about his weapons on display at the lab and such. For a number of years now his legend just hasn't sounded right to me, and I would like to articulate why, in an effort to get the facts straight about the history of cryonics and its major figures.

One thing I no longer have in common with Rue McClanahan

She died a member of the University of Tulsa's alumni association -- named a Distinguished Alumna in 1999, in fact, though from my perspective that resembles winning the Special Olympics.

I, by contrast, managed to piss off the people who run that association, so they removed my name as a member.

I learned the hard way that if you start out at a relatively high status university, and then transfer to get your degree from a lower status one which treats the academic functions of a university almost as a nuisance, you can damage your employability and earning prospects considerably.

Dan McIntyre, an "ideal type" cryonicist, as seen in the year 2000

I met Dan McIntyre a few times in the 1990's, and he did generally fit the profile or "ideal type" of cryonicist identified by Tiffany Romain, including some personality characteristics which suggest to me now that he shared the high-functioning autism or Asperger's commonly seen in cryonicists. Though instead of going into a scientific or technical field, he studied law (as have several other cryonicists I've met or know of).

The OC Weekly magazine ran an article about Dan back in 2000, written by Dave Wielenga; yet parts of it sound almost as if Romain had written it. Wielenga reports about Dan:

McIntyre suspects he'll develop new interests—again, with no limits. He imagines working out with weights until he can lift 2,000 pounds. He imagines having sex on demand, and making it better than ever by fashioning a body with additional penises. He imagines meeting a clone of himself, and he is tickled by what the conversation might be like. He imagines living in space stations and vacationing on Earth, which would be preserved as a historic artifact and recreational playground. He imagines being a historical remnant himself—and perhaps a celebrity because of it. He imagines being happy.

Compare with what Romain writes in her paper:

The many imaginaries of human life post-reanimation are quite wide-ranging and include waking in the future in an optimized version of one’s current physical self (no need for glasses, restored full head of hair); waking in an 18-year-old version of oneself; minimal or radical changes in physical appearance and continual alteration of appearance and/or gender for the sake of experience; living in a fully cyborg, better-than-human body; cloning oneself and transferring memories to the clone in order to make ‘‘back-up copies’’; uploading oneself into a computer and living virtually; uploading consciousness and sending out remote controlled robot proxies to unfriendly environments.

Wielenga also notes the strange duality in Dan, combining an ordinary life in the here-and-now (including career problems which I'll get to presently) with his imagined life in Future World:

Mostly, however, he thinks—plans, imagines, fantasizes—about what he's going to do when his life will consist of nearly inconceivable amounts of time to kill. And the way he's got it figured, the future is mostly going to be about kicking back.

"You can be ambitious if you want to, but nanotechnology is going to make work irrelevant," says McIntyre, who was recently downsized out of a career as a law professor at Western State University in Fullerton and is now a tax lawyer for Triple Check, the tax-return service. "All I really want to do is read and watch my educational TV. At a minimum, I'm going to be able to do that.

Similarly, Romain writes:

The socio-temporal scales of cryonics require simultaneously existing both in the present and in projections of the future, which is a feature of American risk-society. . . Many Americans engage in the practice of imagining the future, setting goals and working toward them and protecting against undesirable futures. Unlike other Americans, however, cryonicists imagine possibilities for their lives in a very distant future, an imagined future that is distinct from the life they intend to live until they are frozen. At the same time, cryonicists must also contend with the present, mundane, day-to-day tasks of middle-class American life in a very practical sense—making an income, managing finances, paying the life insurance bill, filing paperwork—and many of these daily, present-minded tasks make imagining such futures possible for cryonicists. While highly future-oriented, cryonics requires preparation in the present, here, and now.

Tragically in Dan's case, the "day-to-day tasks of middle-class American life," ironically involving the filing of paperwork, defeated him. Apparently he became depressed over the direction of his law career (the involuntary move from teaching at a law school to working for a tax-return service sounds like downward social mobility to me, and it probably felt that way to Dan as well); from what I've heard in the cryonics gossip network, some time after this article appeared, he committed suicide in a way which prevented him from getting cryosuspended. I don't know the details of Dan's downward spiral. I got the impression that Dan lived frugally, but he might still have had financial problems (the lack of a substantial "Fuck You Fund") which constrained him from improving his employment situation.

Well, I can't do anything to help that now. I do find it interesting, however, that independent observers often come away with similar impressions of cryonicists. Enough of us exist that certain stereotypes about us have already started to form.

A surprisingly upbeat review of Robert Ettinger's second book (1972)

Given the anxiety disorder about "the future" displayed by the current batch of scientific opinion-makers, especially regarding "transhumanist" issues, I have trouble imagining a popular science magazine publishing a review like this today of Robert Ettinger's Man Into Superman.

From New Scientist, Dec. 21, 1972:

People noticed the cultish behavior of Randroids even in the 1960s.

From the April 7, 1967 issue of Life magazine. I also like the Mad Men-reminiscent ads in this issue:

The Cult of Angry Ayn Rand

"I envy you... You have someone to worry about."

A very non-Objectivist line in the 1959 film On the Beach, spoken by the physicist character played by Fred Astaire. I can't imagine an Objectivist hero envying someone for having an irrational wife and baby to worry about.

Does BP have a cryonics-like problem?

Assuming that the Deepwater Horizon crisis continues to resist technological solutions, I wonder when "skeptics" will start to dismiss efforts to plug the flow of oil as pseudoscience, denial or a scam. They might advocate instead that we learn to live with an oily Gulf of Mexico as an existential reality, and endure it the best we can through literature, religion, poetry and humor.

My Capgras-like female environment

A few years ago I read about something called "Capgras delusion," apparently an organic brain dysfunction which Wikipedia defines as:

a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor.

I mentally filed away that information; though after I found a reference to this delusion recently in another source, and thought about it some more, I had an insight:

In my adult life, going back to my freshman year of college, I seem to have had responses to the women in my environment somewhat analogous to Capgras delusion, only I withhold judgment about the "delusion" part. I recognize women's faces and bodies; they look the way I expect them to, and I certainly find some of them sexually attractive, so I've never felt an impostor replaced a woman I knew previously.

But women on the whole tend to behave in ways which make me uncomfortable, instead of ways I would expect them to behave. They also seem deficient in personhood somehow, though I have trouble articulating my tacit knowledge of the deficiency.

In other words, at times I feel that I live in a world full of female impostors. What happened to the women I expected to feel some reciprocated emotional connections with in my adult life? Instead of that outcome, too many women cluster around an uncanny valley. I don't enjoy interacting with most of them socially, and way too many of them bore or annoy me, even if I find them sexually attractive otherwise.

I suppose my Aspergerish tendencies contribute to this feeling. A number of women have described me as "cold," so perhaps I fall into their uncanny valley as well.

The power of woman's mind.

I love reading stories about inventors and other smart people. Alia Sabur sounds like a Danica McKellar who decided to do something useful with her abilities:

I can plug oil leak, says NY genius

BP's engineers can't stop the gushing oil spill, but a young genius from Long Island says she found the solution in less time than it takes most people to finish a crossword puzzle.

Since the "top kill," "junk shot" and "top hat" techniques failed to end the environmental nightmare, Alia Sabur -- who started her engineering Ph.D. at age 14 -- is pushing for a more radical idea.

The Northport native, who started reading before she could walk and who at 18 broke a 300-year-old record to become the youngest-ever college professor, proposes surrounding a pipe with deflated automobile tires, inserting it into the leaking riser, and then inflating the wheels to form a seal.

I don't know the details of inflating tires with air against a pressure of ~150 atmospheres at the reported depth of Deepwater Horizon, unless Sabur proposes using another mixture of gases or even a liquid instead.

Nonetheless, it doesn't surprise me that the need for solutions to this disaster has turned into an unsolicited and unplanned crowdsourcing effort. I haven't found anything so far from the TRIZ community about this problem. You would have to formulate the technical contradiction correctly, which means you want to improve #23, Loss of substance, in this case, petroleum. But what gets worse when you try to do that?

Some leftists' views of Ayn Rand

I'd like to see the Strict Father camp develop a stronger case for our position than Rand's. The more we find out about her, the crazier she sounds; and she ignores way too much of reality to address our real needs.

For example, apart from Whittaker Chambers's famous takedown of Atlas Shrugged, few of Rand's critics that I know of have drawn attention to the fact that Rand revealed this weird blindness about the reproductive function of sex and the role of family relationships in most people's lives. Her ignorance of, and reported skepticism about, the theory of evolution might have contributed to her blind spot.

Men in the real world compete with each other to produce and accumulate wealth because that buys them higher status; higher status attracts reproductively fit women for the men to inseminate and impregnate so that they can pass their genes into the future. Most high status men don't care a lot about their women's intelligence or personality as long as the women meet certain physical standards, put out for them and demonstrate fertility if the men want to start families. A Strict Father world view would have to incorporate and acknowledge these facts.

Yet Rand came along with her fantasies about the superior men who live without sex for much of their lives because they don't have access to the superior heroine character until the plot calls for it. Does anyone seriously think that a real-life Francisco d'Anconia would have gone celibate for the rest of his life after his youthful affair with Dagny? (In the novel Rand has Francisco spread rumors that he lived like Tiger Woods, as a cover for his project to destroy his family's fortune; but later in the novel the character claims he didn't help himself to the sex other women offered him, as implausible as that sounds.) Or that a real-life Hank Rearden wouldn't find another girlfriend? Or that John Galt waited until his late 30's for his sexual debut with Dagny in one of Taggart Transcontinental's store rooms, where his "equipment" functioned flawlessly? (I have reasons to find that unlikely.)

I wonder if, in fact, Atlas Shrugged appeals so strongly to propeller-heads because they can relate to its hero's experiences: A brilliant scientist/inventor/engineer/adult male virgin feels undervalued despite his abilities, so he trashes his well paid technological career, takes a menial job on a railroad, stalks the railroad's beautiful but capable vice president, sabotages her business deals, makes her fall in love with him, has the first sexual experience in his life with her in a chance encounter, and then lives happily with her after destroying the corrupt society which appreciated neither of them.

What geek hasn't thought about doing something like that?

And yet I still respect what Rand wanted to do, despite her blunders and absurdities: Articulate a philosophy for living on earth. Over the week end I had lunch in a restaurant with some of my cryonics friends, and I joked that I thanked man's reason for the food before us, the sort of thing an Objectivist would say. To me, crediting a god as the source of our wealth makes about as much sense as attributing babies to the stork, only we can see that storks exist.

But upon reflection, I realized that I shouldn't joke about it. Man's reason does produce what we have, as Rand emphasized. I'd like to see a cultural trend which acknowledges and teaches this fact as a fundamental principle. It might counter the other trend which views wealth as some mysterious thing in "the commons" which anyone can help himself to through political means. But that would probably require a philosophy somewhat different from Objectivism.