A product of Gene Roddenberry's humanism

She lives in Scottsdale, too. I wonder if she's ever thought about cryonics:

Stephen Valentine's Timeship presentation

I listened to part of architect Stephen Valentine's live, online presentation about the Timeship project during Suspended Animation's conference last Saturday. Apparently the investors have bought land for it already, near a major city in central Texas from what I've heard. The property already has a Southern plantation-looking house which will serve as a conference facility, research lab, lodging for visitors, etc.

The Timeship itself, as Valentine described it, will incorporate various kinds of symbolism in its construction which don't serve any practical purpose. He made it sound more like a Masonic temple than a functional building for the scientific and medical objectives of cryonics.

Eh, that gives me a bad vibe. I'd like to see that sort of money spent towards more urgent needs in cryonics.

PZ Myers's rant

More than a case of "Somebody has to say it." A lot of people need to speak up about the absurdity of the christian doomsday cult (XDC):

Wrong, root and branch; wrong at every cell and molecule; wrong to the core

Sure, everyone is laughing at Harold Camping now, except his followers, who are undeterred. But you're missing the real joke. Look at every Abrahamic religion, with their myths of prophets and favored peoples and fate. Look at the crazy conservative church in your town, that preaches homophobia and anti-science and supports Israel because of the Armageddon prophecy. Look at the liberal Christian church down the street from you that has the nice Vacation Bible School and puts on happy plays for the older kids, and also teaches that one day you will stand before a great god and be judged. Look at your family members who blithely believe in death as a mini-apocalypse, in which they will be magically translated into another realm, again to be judged.

It's the very same rot, the poison of religion that twists minds away from reality and fastens them on hellish bogeymen. They're demented fuckwits, every one, and the big lie rests right on the fundamental beliefs of supernaturalism and deities, not on the ephemera of one crank's bizarre interpretations.

And to the next person who quotes Matthew 24:36 at me: you're part of the problem, too.

Ayn Rand's philosophy: The other secular humanism

I have to wonder if Rand's rising stock among conservatives derives from the same social processes which have led to the decline of American religiosity in general. American conservatives often come from business backgrounds, so from hindsight they might have emphasized religion in the latter 20th Century as a branding strategy to distinguish conservatism from the alternative world view promoted by the Soviet Union, not because conservatism necessarily requires belief in supernaturals. With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, and the conversion of communist China into a more bourgeois sort of country, conservatives who don't organically view the world in religious ways may feel freer to tolerate, if not share, Rand's atheism.

Speaking of failed rapture predictions

I don't know what to make of the Foresight Institute 25th Anniversary Reunion. We clearly haven't reached anywhere near to the wonderful future propagandized about "nanotechnology" back in the 1980's and early 1990's. And I can guarantee that nobody who attends this conference will have gotten 25 years younger.

"Join friends old and new this summer at Google's Mountain View headquarters in Silicon Valley as we explore the future of nanotech . . ."? Hey, guys, look at the year on the calendar. We live in "the future of nanotech" many of you talked about with breathless anticipation 20-25 years ago. You have some explaining to do.

I watched part of the Suspended Animation conference online the other day, and I'd make the same challenge to the droning booster of "nanomedicine" who speaks at these conferences. (I halfway expected him to call roll, and then notice Ferris Bueller's absence.) He said that we'd see some kind of breakthrough in another 20 years. What about the breakthrough he promised would happen in 20 years, but back in the early 1990's?

Another reason to beat up on the rapture delusion

I like empirical data. Pew reported this last year:

41% - Jesus Christ's Return to Earth

By the year 2050, 41% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ definitely (23%) or probably (18%) will have returned to earth. However, a 46%-plurality of the public does not believe Christ will return during the next 40 years. Fully 58% of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth in this period, by far the highest percentage in any religious group.

This shows that the rapture and associated apocalyptic nonsense have become mainstream American beliefs, not just the obsessions of marginal groups. This makes millions of Americans suckers for successors to Harold Camping in the christian doomsday hustle.

Enough of this! The christian doomsday cult, which I'll abbreviate as XDC, wore out its welcome 1900 years ago, when it became clear that its foundational prophecies failed. It has even less reason to exist now. The rational, efficient and humane world this cryonicist wants to reach (I can't speak for all of us) has no room for the XDC and similar cults like militant Islam. I plan to become more active in organized humanist, skeptic and atheist groups from now on to push back against this and other enormities against reason.

More on the rapture aftermath

John and Ken follow up on the rapture hoax:



I hope the magnitude of this fiasco will shame younger people from going into the rapture hustle for the next couple decades.

Christians in cryonics? I don't get it.

Which contingency do they consider as their Plan B? Do they view cryonics as their backup plan in case heaven doesn't exist, in other words?

Have they even pondered the implications of radical life extension? Assuming that they pass through the right bottlenecks, they could very well live long enough to witness the "Jesus who?" era. Mike Darwin recollects the following conversation he had with Curtis Henderson:

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, Curtis Henderson was driving us out of Sayville to go the Cryo-Span facility, and I said something that irritated him – really set him off on a tear. Beverly (Gillian Cumings) had just died, and it had become clear that she was not going to get frozen, and I was moaning about it, crying about it in fact, and this is what he said to me: “You wanna live forever kid? You really wanna live forever?! Well, then you better be ready to go through a lot more of this – ’cause this ain’t nothin. Ever been burned all over, or had your hand squashed in a machine? Well get prepared for it, because you’re gonna experience that, and a lot more that’s worse than either you or me can imagine. Ever lost your girlfriend or you wife, or your mother or your father, or your best friend? Well, you’re gonna loose ‘em, and if you live long enough, really, really long enough, you’re gonna lose everybody; and then you’ll lose ‘em over and over again. Even if they don’t die, you’ll lose ‘em, so be prepared. You see all this here; them boats, this street, that ocean, that sun in that sky? You’re gonna lose ‘em all! The more you go on, the more you’ll leave behind, so I’m telling you here and now, you’d best be damn certain about this living forever thing, because it’s gonna be every bit as much Hell as it Heaven.”

He was right, too. — Mike Darwin

I think we could even witness the end of theism eventually, though new religions could also come along to dominate the culture. I suspect the rapture belief reflects many christians' fear that their religion faces supplantation; christianity may have already reached its own era analogous to the late "BC" period.

Surviving the rapture - again

Harold Camping's rapture hoax really pisses me off, especially because it reminds me of aspects of my upbringing which I found frustrating.

I grew up in Tulsa, and during my teen years in the 1970's an earlier wave of delusional thinking about the rapture swept through fundamentalist churches because of Hal Lindsey's 1970 book, The Late, Great Planet Earth. I knew people in Tulsa who took this nonsense literally, believed that we had reached the "end times," and expected to get raptured at any moment. I also encountered another wave of the delusion in the late 1980's caused by Edgar C. Whisenant's book, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.

Now we've just witnessed yet another round of this insanity thanks to 89-year-old Harold Camping, who probably needs to go into a nursing home and have someone assume power of attorney to make decisions for him. If my 84-year-old father with Alzheimer's had started talking like Camping, we would appropriately attribute his ramblings to impaired cognition instead of divine revelation.

I also feel sympathy for the children whose parents have sabotaged their futures because of this nonsense. A woman in Lancaster, California, reportedly tried to murder her children to spare them from the apocalypse. The New York Times ran a story the other day about a family whose parents drank Camping's Kool-Aid, much to their teen children's consternation. The story quotes the 14-year-old son as saying, “I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore, because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.” I imagine today this boy has lost respect for his parents, yet he still has to live with them until he reaches his majority and can move out. No child should have to experience that. I wonder how many more children have to put up with similar parents after the failure of Camping's doomsday.

Naturally other christians have issued disclaimers to distance themselves from the Camping scandal. Either they say their churches have different interpretations of eschatology which don't involve a rapture; or else they believe in something like the rapture, but quote Jesus' verse about not knowing the timing, while also denouncing Camping as a false prophet.

Yet the rapture goes to the heart of the christian message. As near as anyone can tell, christianity started out as a doomsday cult with explicit prophecies about Jesus' "return" as some spooky super-powered entity within the lifetimes of his earliest followers. Those followers would have all died by 100 CE or so, so logically the cult should have gone extinct by then. Instead the later generations of christians devised rationalizations to keep the cult in business, adapting to the prospect that humanity faced an indefinite secular future ahead of it, but with the doomsday belief still in the background somewhere. (In a way, one of the rationalizations invented in the Arabian peninsula for Jesus' nonarrival turned into Islam. And does the Muslim belief about getting the 72 virgins in heaven as a reward for committing suicidal attacks against infidels make any less sense than belief in the rapture?)

The recurring doomsday prophets in the christian tradition - and the tradition has produced hundreds of them - keep making christians uneasy because they remind them of their religion's unfulfilled predictions. Camping just provides the latest reminder of the irrationality in the christian foundational documents which many christians find too embarrassing to acknowledge.

At least these prophecies now generate more mockery than adherence. At one time whole communities would get caught up in end times hysteria. L.A. radio hosts John Kobylt and Ken Champou show more of a proper response to this folly:

I've known a few people in my lifetime who, by contrast, grew up as atheists, and who therefore never had to suffer from exposure to christian doomsday propaganda. To me they seem nearly like characters from some advanced, enlightened civilization out of science fiction.

A necessary reality check on "transhumanism"

Consider this list of speakers from Alcor's conference in 1978:



I count 25 names. How many of these people have died by now, despite the conference's premise 33 years ago about "the current state of life extension sciences"?

Just off the top of my head:

Paul Segall - cryonically suspended, or so I've heard.

Bernard Strehler - dead.

Roy Walford - dead.

Jerry Leaf - cryonically suspended.

Robert Prehoda - apparently dead.

Timothy Leary - dead.

F.M. Esfandiary - cryonically suspended.

Alan Harrington - dead.

Robert Anton Wilson - dead.

Some of the speakers I know of haven't died yet, while I haven't bothered to search the rest. Nonetheless, over a third of them didn't get much out of the "life extension sciences" promoted by That '70's Transhumanism. From hindsight they might as well not bothered holding this sort of conference.

It makes you wonder how many speakers at today's transhumanist conferences will wind up dead according to actuarial expectations, despite the propaganda about reaching actuarial escape velocity.

Rapture watch parties

People around the U.S., if not in other countries, have scheduled "rapture watch parties" for May 21 to mock Harold Camping's nonsense.

I've attended one of those before, back in 1988, to witness the failure of Edgar C. Whisenant's rapture prediction. Whisenant came through Tulsa some weeks before to speak to local churches and plug his book, so a lot of people in the area knew about his prophecy. A local radio talkshow host at KRMG set up her microphone in the parking lot on the evening of the fatal day, and until midnight she interviewed people who showed up to talk about the rapture. I went with a couple atheist friends of mine at the time, Graham Kendall and Dan Hannah, to witness the shenanigans. The talkshow host even played a joke on the audience at midnight when we all agreed to stop talking suddenly, which cued the radio tech back in the building to call her name on the air in fake panic, as if we had all suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth. As I recall, some people phoned the station to complain about its irreverent treatment of their eschatology.

Gary North, a christian kook of a different sort, has something interesting to say about the psychology of the rapture believer, and its practical, real-world consequences:

The Bible teaches that "a good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just" (Proverbs 13:22). The Rapture doctrine teaches that the wealth of the just is laid up for the sinner. So, why spend a lifetime of above-average effort and risk-taking in order to lay up an inheritance that will be confiscated by the sinners left behind?

A radical present-orientation afflicts Protestant fundamentalists. In 1970, Edward Banfield identified the primary origin of lower-class culture as its present-orientation. (See the original edition of his book, The Unheavenly City.) It is not a person's income but rather his time-perspective that best identifies his class position. Fundamentalists, by this definition, are lower class.

A person who has no faith in the long-term earthly future of his legacy is unlike to save, work long hours to build a business, advance his education, or do anything else that involves long-term sacrifice, other than foreign missions. Ludwig von Mises argued that people with high time-preference (low future-orientation) pay high interest rates to borrow money, and will not save unless they are offered high interest rates by borrowers. Cultures that are high time-preference societies experience low capital formation and therefore low economic growth, he said. They are unwilling to pay for it. They get what they pay for.

I suspect the rapture delusion also derives from many christians' worry that their religion will eventually disappear, yet humanity will go on about its business and not notice the absence. I, for one, hope to live long enough to see the "Jesus who?" era.

1970's futurology

I remember seeing this issue of Future magazine when it came out on the newsstands in 1978. I think I owned a copy at one time.



Perhaps today's "futurology," especially the transhumanist and singularitarian versions, doesn't impress me because I heard most of this stuff over 30 years ago, and way too much of it hasn't arrived yet, despite all the propaganda about "accelerating change."

You can see the disconnect in today's science fiction. I've started to read the ebook version of Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi's "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy. What does Scalzi's version of the novel's hero, Jack Holloway, use a lot in his far-future society, specifically on an exoplanet where he makes his living as a prospector? Something called an "infopanel."

Jeez, in 2011 I could get one of those at Best Buy in Prescott, AZ. We call them "tablet PC's," or in Apple's case, "iPads." Why doesn't Holloway have this advanced information technology integrated into his body, as Michio Kaku forecasts will become the norm by 2100 in his book Physics of the Future?

And Scalzi's Holloway certainly doesn't wear anything like FM-2030's life-support suit or immortality module. (Kaku describes clothing with functions like a life-support suit's in his book as well.) Scalzi novel so far reads like science fiction about "the future" written in the 1970's, even though he has said that he wanted to retell Piper's story in a way better suited to the culture of the early 21st Century.

So, when does the 21st Century start to look like the sales jobs for it in the 20th Century?

1980's Alcor promotional video

The cryonicist who speaks at 10:18 credits propaganda about "nanotechnology" as the deal maker for his decision to sign up. That looks like a dubious reason now, given how 1980's "nanotechnology" apparently can't work because it gets the physics wrong.

As I keep saying, cryonics needs some serious rebooting. What would cryonics look like in an alternative 2011 if someone invented it as a new idea, without the burden of its history in this timeline?

Time Travelers from Fred&Linda Chamberlain on Vimeo.

Ayn Rand's floating door

I've come up with a model to explain Ayn Rand's new popularity, because I suspect that it says more about "progressivism" than about Rand's merits.

Suppose your ship at sea sinks, and in the effort to stay alive, you latch onto the nearest buoyant object, in this case a floating door, as your life raft. A door sucks as a raft, but it beats the alternative of drowning. And in the absence of a proper boat, you might come to rationalize the door as a well constructed life raft which meets all your needs for survival.

Rand's philosophy has characteristics of the floating door in my model. Many people feel an organic revulsion against the world view of progressivism which threatens to drown them, as well they should. But in the absence of a proper ship, a number of such individuals have grabbed onto Rand's philosophy as a makeshift to maintain themselves in a viable condition.

In other words, when you have to choose between, on the one hand, the abyss of abnegation offered by progressivism, and on the other hand, a weak philosophy created by Ayn Rand which offers self-respect and values your personal fulfillment - well, to many people Rand's weak philosophy looks like a better deal.

Beneath Rand's nuttiness, I think she displayed fundamentally healthy instincts. People tend to feel spiritually replenished by association with competence, virtue and success (the constituency of conservatives); and spiritually depleted by exposure to incompetence, immorality and failure (the constituency of progressives). Human nature determines this polarization, not ideology. You see this reality in even the most degraded underclass communities from their enthusiasm for commercial sports. Sports celebrate the conservative values of competition, a meritocracy of ability, and differential financial rewards based on performance. Fans from the underclass would not respect a sport which tries to enforce the progressive world view on its outcomes, even when progressives try to do the same to them through the political process.

Cryonics as a 500+ year project

In response to Mike Darwin's post on the Chronosphere blog, which deserves reading in its entirety, Paul B writes:

While nanotechnology is certainly in its most early stages I have to be skeptical that it will ultimately prove the solution to reviving patients in suspension. The same temperatures needed to keep tissues from decaying will likely prevent molecular machines from functioning well.

No, I imagine there will need to be the emergence of brand new technologies we can barely imagine to restore resting cryonauts. As such the time frame will be much longer than most might guess and I believe we need to plan for 500 years plus.

I guess Paul B disagrees with Eric Drexler's assessment of "Nanotechnology" as "the last technological revolution." Assuming that enough cryonicists awaken from the mass hypnosis about imaginary and probably impossible "nanomachines" as the revival mechanism, and instead start to treat cryonics as a venture into the indefinite future with unknowable outcomes, what would that require us to do?

Boy, I wish I had some good answers to that. If I had a say about how to run a cryonics organization (and I have demographic reasons to expect that I could in the next few years), just from common sense I would emphasize the aggressive accumulation, growth and protection of the organization's wealth, which means that we shouldn't let America-centric chauvinism get in the way of practicality. If America experiences economic decline relative to other countries, then we should figure out how to plug into the wealth creation in those other countries, even if we have to evade capital controls to do so.

We also need a civilization which stays scientifically, technologically and medically progressive, which means that we have some "skin in the game" in maintaining scientific and technological education, like Dean Kamen's FIRST. Despite what some cryonicists think, religiosity competes with the desire for radical life extension, so cryonicists as individuals also have some incentive to promote atheism, skepticism and critical thinking. Fortunately ordinary secular education works in our favor.

Going out on another limb, I suspect cryonics would benefit more in the long run from conservative politics than from progressive politics. Conservative policies tends to build up a society's capital, both physical and moral, while progressive policies tend to deplete it through the punishment of bourgeois habits and the erosion of self-reliance, self-discipline and planning for the future.

But I label these as idle speculations. I'd like to participate in discussions with other cryonicists to see what ideas they have about the prospect of a 500+ year planning horizon for cryonics, given the likely impossibility of Nanotechnology.

I think I stand on firmer ground with my advice that we should distance cryonics from the propeller heads' other fads, like Friendly AI, mind files, the Singularity and other speculations which will probably sound preposterous in a few years.

I know a guy.

Since the early 1990's I've known a cryonics enthusiast who recently had to drop out for financial reasons, though he still has the life insurance policy for $50,000 which he bought years ago to pay for his suspension when Alcor charged less for the neuro option.

Normally I would feel some sympathy. But in his case, he suffers from a self-inflicted damage load. During my acquaintance with this individual, I've seen him waste a lot of time and money in the search for a series of tricks, gimmicks and shortcuts to try to get ahead in life, even though The Gods of the Copybook Heading decree that these things don't work compared with the boring, basic habits which usually get the job done, if anything will. For example, this individual lost money in a blatant pyramid scheme in the late 1990's call StockGeneration, and he may have lost money in other ill-advised investments as well.

I've also had to witness his other obsessions, delivered either in phone conversations or posted on the internet: Neo-Tech, Y2K (we know how that turned out), Lyndon LaRouche, conspiracy theories, quack medical beliefs, Jew-hating rants, and lately the threat that a new ice age poses to cryonics. I would nominate him as the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. Before he took his most recent blog private, I advised him that he should distrust his own judgment, given his track record, and follow the advice of people who can make better decisions for him. At the very least he should restrict his activities to a handful of things which have a basis in reality and work reliably so that he can reduce his anxiety level - doing the Henry David Thoreau thing, for example.

This individual, although an extreme example, shows the cognitive problem cryonicists face: We want to live a really long time, and we think about "the future" in a more self-interested way than most. (What do cryonicists call magazines about astronomy? Real estate magazines.) Yet we have inadequate mental equipment for dealing with "the future" in the most effective ways. The human mind evolved s a disposable kludge for replicating genes, not for keeping the mind itself in business for centuries; so we need to find techniques to counteract its nature and make it do what we need it to do for our survival. I would like to see serious discussions of this problem at cryonics conferences, instead of more cryonics theater about revival through physically impossible nanomachines.

And now, no more Osama bin Laden.

From Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper (the poor man's Robert Heinlein, but still under-appreciated as a science fiction writer):

"Your dotard king couldn't rule without Zaspar Makann, and Makann couldn't rule without me, and neither can you," he said. "Shoot this gang of turncoats, and I'll rule Marduk for you." He looked at Trask again. "Who are you?" he demanded. "I don't know you."

Trask slipped the pistol from his holster, thumbing off the safety.

"I am Lucas Trask. You've heard that name before," he said. "Stand away from behind him, you people."

"Oh, yes; the poor fool who thought he was going to marry Elaine Karvall. Well, you won't, Lord Trask of Traskon. She loves me, not you. She's waiting for me now, on Gram...."

Trask shot him through the head. Dunnan's eyes widened in momentary incredulity; then his knees gave way, and he fell forward on his face. Trask thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, and looked at the body on the concrete.

It hadn't made the least difference. It had been like shooting a snake, or one of the nasty scorpion-things that infested the old buildings in Rivington. Just no more Andray Dunnan.

"Take that carrion and stuff it in a mass-energy converter," he said. "And I don't want anybody to mention the name of Andray Dunnan to me again."

I can think of several more people besides Osama bin Laden to shoot in the head and thereby make the world a better place for the rest of us. As another science fiction writer, H.G. Wells, said about a century ago: "People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it."