Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Subject: Selling Cryonics (was ICE DWARFS)
Message-ID: <71938@cup.portal.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 19:41:54 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
References: <1992Dec15.125933.42625@urz.unibas.ch>
Lines: 335

A Theoretical Understanding
By
H. Keith Henson
and
Arel Lucas

The March '89 Cryonics carried Dave Kekich's article "A
Practical Memorial." It was about Oz, Dave's friend who did not make
it into suspension when he needed it--despite many qualities you would
think predisposed him to consider cryonics. Not the least of these predispositions was having a close friend long active in cryonics. In
the article, Dave focused on his sense of failure as a cryonics
salesman in his effort to understand why Oz did not make suspension arrangements. The article has prompted us to spend some time in front
of our word processors on another way to view the problem of "selling cryonics"-- in terms of the genetic origin of humans and the memetic
origin of culture. In this discussion, there are deep connections to evolution, which itself is well rooted in our understanding of the
physical world around us. Because of the need for background, we will
wander a long way from the immediate problem of getting people to make
cryonic suspension arrangements, but by the time we get back, you
might have a deeper appreciation of the difficulties of "selling" the
cryonics concept.

Most readers of Cryonics understand that we arrived at our
current physical structure (which includes everything--genes, jawbones
and brains) through the process of evolution, that is through random
variation and very non-random survival. About 4.5 million years ago
our branch of the primate tree split from our nearest relatives the chimpanzees when the climate changed, and the shrinking forest left
them "high and dry." (All this is current best guess, but there is a
large collection of evidence.) An entire suite of physical and
behavioral changes seems to have happened together.

Chimpanzees today have behaviors, such as sharing meat, that
our common ancestors are likely to have had. This tendency seems to
have been elaborated by our male ancestors into a steady provisioning
of the females and young by bringing food to them from the
encroaching, but highly productive, protein-rich plains. (As opposed
to the chimps' way of life where the females provide virtually all
food for the young and the males guard the territory.) Incidentally,
compared to forest, grasslands provide a *lot* of meat per square
mile.

It is likely our common ancestor could walk upright for a
short distance since chimps can do it. Walking upright for ever
further distances had an advantage because the males who could free
their hands for carrying food in this changed situation were more
successful in the number of children who carried their genes in the
next generation. Of course this took place in social groups, so there
was continual selection for: genes that made cooperative behavior
more likely; genes to exploit others cooperation; and genes to resist
being suckered. Computer evolution simulations (see Selfish Gene) of
such situations lead to stable mixes of reproductive strategies
similar to what are actually observed in human populations.

As genes became more common which (through the process of embryogenesis) constructed males more and more likely to work (mostly
in groups) to feed *their* mates and children, other traits became advantageous. Sequestered estrous (as opposed to the flamboyant
chimpanzee event), continual sexual receptivity, and a tendency toward monogamy (and jealousy) all tend to genetically reward provisioning
males. All of this culminated in the several- million-year old
institution of the human family.&

[footnote & An alternate scenario could be constructed, a sex-for-meat
swap, starting with females who were somewhat receptive even when not
in estrous. Same result.]

The net effect of all these changes was to about double the reproductive rate of proto-humans compared to the chimpanzees. Our
ancestors needed the high reproductive rate because the plains were *Dangerous* places (no trees to climb). A lot of them seem to have
been eaten by leopards and the other large predators of the time.

Some 2.5 million years ago we find the first evidence of
worked stone. While even chimpanzees pass cultural knowledge, such as
how to catch termites, from generation to generation, worked stone is
the first surviving evidence that our ancestors started passing down
the generations complex, non-genetic, behavior- influencing
information. This information can be said to program high level
"agents" in the mind which are invoked to do or make things. About
the same time, the brain size of our forebears started to increase substantially over the chimpanzee's. Tool making and larger brains
probably influenced each other in a positive feedback cycle.

Those able to learn the more complex tasks from those around
them must have had a significant survival advantage, in spite of the
increased maternal and infant mortality from getting those larger
brains delivered.

As the *information* of how to chip rock and other such
discoveries was passed on to larger numbers of the very people whose
survival it enhanced, a new evolving entity, the "meme" or replicating information pattern became increasing significant.

(footnote ref--first defined in The Selfish Gene by Richard
Dawkins 1976)

Genes are totally dependent on cells; complex memes are no
less dependent on large human brains. Memes run the gamut from
essential symbionts to dangerous parasites. They evolve, and, in
particular, they have *co-evolved* with the human line. In the
aggregate, they constitute culture. The memetic information passed
down from generation to generation exceeded our genetic data some time
ago.

As human brains enlarged they improved in the ability to
anticipate changes, making plans to hunt, to move with the seasons,
and, later, to plant seeds for a future harvest. These and similar
"smart" behaviors have obvious survival advantages, but they may have disadvantages as well. Alas, it seems that it is quite possible to be
too smart for "the good of one's genes." A contemporary example is the statistical fact that highly intelligent people have significantly
fewer children than the norm. For very different reasons, people of *subnormal* intelligence also have lower-than-average reproductive
success.

Many traits of populations that have a bell curve distribution
are trimmed by some form of selection on both ends. If they were not,
natural selection on individuals on one end of the curve would cause
the population norm to drift until a new norm was reached where
individuals far out from the norm in either direction suffered reduced reproductive success in about the same amounts.

Being able to anticipate the future may not have been an
unmixed blessing for early humans. Besides worrying about what to eat
in the morning, and how to get through the night without being eaten,
our ancestors could worry about existential angst, and ponder
questions of the "Where Was I Before I Was Me?" and "What Happens
After I Die?" kind. It may sound silly, but such questions, prompted
by frequent deaths among those around you may have been a barrier for
hundreds of thousands of years to the emergence of smarter people with enhanced ability to anticipate and plan for the future. It is not
good for your genes to be dwelling on such questions while something
large, furry, and not in the least concerned about angst, sneaks up
and nips off your head!

(footnote --at least if it does it before you have lots of
kids, and have helped raise lots of grandkids. The recognition of
this fact is reflected in the Chinese tradition that those who would
attempt to understand the I Ching--a contemplative task bound to
invoke troubling questions--are traditionally warned off doing so
until they have completed the parental phase of life, and secured the
future of their grandchildren.)

We know that eventually smarter people did emerge, and came to dominate the world. This started about 200,000 years ago, roughly the
same time that DNA studies indicate that one woman was the common
ancestor of us all. Like chipped rock and larger brains emerging
together, it is possible that some meme mutated out of more primitive
ones, or arose from observations to form a "religious belief" that
provided "answers" to such questions and had the effect of
compensating for genes that otherwise would made us too smart for our
own (genetic) good. Beliefs that could fit this description are known
to go back to the very beginning of written history, and
archaeological digs produce physical evidence (flower grave offerings)
of such beliefs back at least 70,000 years. (The actual timing is not important to this argument, but objects believe to be "religious" in
nature became common by about 35,000 years ago.)

"Religious" memes compensating for too-smart-for-their-
own-good brains is rank speculation, but Marvin Minsky argues that
more complex brains are inherently less stable. It is true that our
more remote relatives (such as cows) seem to have fewer mental
problems, perhaps just because they have less "mental." His
thought

(footnote--- personal communication through Eric Drexler)

is that certain "agents" built with patterns from outside
could enhance the stability of a complex mind. He discussed a variety
of mental "agents" in Society of Mind, reviewed in Cryonics some time
ago. One class, censors, would be especially useful if kept someone's
mind from spiraling down into a blue funk over unanswerable questions.
Ideas that when a family member died he had gone to "the happy hunting grounds," and that you would see him again might make a big difference
in the survival of grief- stricken relatives. Jane Goodall's report
of a case where a chimpanzee seems to have died of grief gives this
model some credibility. (The chimp was believed to have had an
abnormally strong attachment to his mother.)

This is very speculative, but "religious" memes could have
"functions" such as reducing the effects of grief or answering
philosophical questions about which it was (genetically) unprofitable
to ponder. These memes would be favored in a causal loop if they
improve the survival of people carrying genes which tend to destablize
a person's mental state, but otherwise improve their survival.

Such genes might (for example) contribute to intelligence, sensitivity, and forming strong emotional attachments. After a few
millennia, religious memes and conditionally advantageous genes would
become quite dependent on each other. In an environment saturated
with religious memes, there would be little pressure for minds to
evolve that could get by without stabilizing memes.

In turn, the religious memes that originated long ago have had
plenty of time to split into varieties, compete for hosts, and
themselves evolve in response to a changing environment. (An
occasional variation may kill its hosts, a la Jim Jones.) A lay
observer looking for similarities over such a period might not
recognize much common ritual. (Joseph Campbell devoted his life to discovering common threads in ritual.) Both modern and ancient
religions seem to "fit" into similar places in the mind, and have the
similar functions of providing "answers" to the unanswerable, and
comfort to the grief stricken.

The environment in those minds (mostly the result of other
memes) has greatly changed as people accumulated more observations
about the world around them and got better at manipulating it. There
are known changes in the history of religion, such as the tendency for monotheistic religions (in the western cultural tradition) to replace polytheistic ones, and the well known tendency for religions (and
similar belief patterns) to mutate into new and competing varieties.
We can see some (the written part) of the accumulated variation. For
example, the religion of the Old Testament is recognizably the
ancestor of the more recent New Testament.

Because humans learn from other adults as well as parents,
religious beliefs that are "better suited" to infect human minds could
spread, even (if it survived translation) across language boundaries.
(Islam simply imposed Arabic on its converts.) In Europe during early historical times, we can see the displacement of older religions with Christianity. Within Christianity we can see in recent historical
times competing varieties mutate from earlier versions (a classic
example would be the Mormons) and within the US in the last decades we
have seen the arrival of both new "religions" such as Scientology, and
the repeated importation of eastern religions. (Almost all new and transplanted religions fail--we only see the ones which grow large
enough to notice.)

Because human minds usually hold only one religion at a time, religious memes are in "competition" for a limited number of human
minds. This sets up the conditions for a powerful "evolutionary
struggle" between religious memes. You should expect the memes which
survive this process to resist being displaced, and to induce their
hosts to propagate them.

How (at long last!) does this relate to the difficulty of
selling cryonics? We submit that the long term mental changes that
happen to people who make cryonics arrangements have a lot in common
with religious conversions.

[footnote We doubt many realize it at the time. When we made
arrangements with Alcor it was just the logical thing to do, given our understanding of nanotechnology. It was only with the threats to
Alcor, and its patients, over the Dora Kent affair that made us
realize how important cryonics had become to us.]

Logically, cryonics should be considered a low tech way to reach high tech medicine, no more
exciting than iron lungs, or pacemakers. Alcor, of course, is *not* a religion; it doesn't aspire even to be a cult. However, the mental
"agents" the cryonics idea constructs in people's minds have the same
"deflect or modify thoughts about death" effect as some of the mental
agents most religious memes build. The cryonics memes seem to "fit"
into the "mental space" in people that is often occupied by a
religion. As a result people class it as one, or something closely
related. Unfortunately, this is a hotly contested spot in the mind!
Memes of this class usually include a submeme, "this is the only true
belief, listen to no others."

(Footnote. Douglas Hoffstadter and one of us (Arel) prefers to look
at a meme as complex as a religion as "a scheme of memes," that is, evolutionary bound cooperating groups of memes similar to the way
mutually advantageous genes are sometimes grouped on cronosomes.
Dawkins discussed the mutual propagation of the God/Hellfire memes in
the Selfish Gene.)

Religious memes (including such beliefs as reincarnation)
build lasting, often lifelong, agents in human minds. This part of
human minds where these agents are located seems to be particularly
resistant to change,

[footnote As an aside, there actually seems to be a very small chunk
of brain tissue that might be called a "religious stabilizing module."
In rare cases where this area was destroyed, the victims could change
what seemed to be deeply held religious beliefs several times a week!
The reference to this is in The Social Brain by Michael Gazzaniga]

perhaps because the "function" of
these memes is not much related to the way "this world" operates.
That is, one belief in this category is about as good for you (and
your genes) as the next. If this is the case, switching holds little advantage, and the process of modifying anything close to this area
may be dangerous to mental stability. Cryonics (if it works) is very
much of an exception to the rule.

On the other hand, the stability of religious beliefs may have
little to do with human survival. It simply may be a characteristic
of the surviving (and therefore observable) religious memes.

The difficulty of changing from one religion to another, or
adding cryonics to your meme set may be compounded by "censor agents"
(as Minsky calls them) that keep deflecting your thoughts away from
thinking about anything to do with death. As much as anything censor
agents may lie at the root of the remarkable degree of procrastination
that you often see in the cryonics signup process. (The complexity of
the paperwork does not help either!)

We wish we could use the memetic model to make specific
suggestions which would allow us all to go out and sign up the world,
or even to save our parents. We can't. The best we can do is suggest
that since most of the mental environment in which the cryonic meme
may take root is determined by other memes, getting the word out about
related subjects may be critically important to the "selling" of
cryonics. A person who knows about nanotechnology/cell repair
machines is much more likely to be infectable by the cryonics meme.
So are the people who hold the computer viewpoint of minds and brains.

Another possibility is that our friends or relatives may
eventually become more responsive. They are likely to be among that majority, "not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to
lay the old aside." Frequent exposure to an idea lessens the
outrageousness of it. Cryonics is, after all, becoming more
respectable. Being dismissed by "most scientists" as the newspaper
stories state is properly interpreted as being accepted by "some
scientists." On the other hand, part of the fear factor about cryonics
is the possibility that it would *work*, and you would be revived all
alone in a future without friends. This may be a large part of the
problem of signing up our parents. Though we may respect them, the
world has changed so much over a single generation that it is hard to
have much in common with them. (And for that matter, it is hard to
have much in common with your children either!) Perhaps we should get
our oldest signed up members (the ones I have met are *really* nice
people) to travel about and talk to our parents.

The memetic model gives some insight into the difficulty the
idea of cryonics faces in a world of competing memes, but the picture
is far from bleak. While cryonics has grown slowly, the growth rate
has increased in the last few years. It would not surprise us for the
cryonics "movement" to experience spectacular growth (Alcor has been
growing at about 30% per year) over the next decade or two, especially
if noticeable progress is made on our *real* goal, life extension
which eventually eliminate the need for cryonic suspension.
Joe,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
http://ricksbbs.synchro.net:8080
IRC www.irccloud.com/irc/ricksbbs/channel/ricksbbs
---
þ Synchronet þ Rick's BBS telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23