Good bye Fred, see you soon

Fred Chamberlain III recently had his brain placed into cryostasis at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale.

Chronosphere says: "Frederick Rockwell Chamberlain, III was and is of absolutely critical importance to cryonics." He was is also a pioneer of the new science of cybernetic life, and of absolutely critical importance to us, his friends.

Fred and Linda Chamberlain incorporated Alcor in 1972; the minutes of those early Alcor meetings can be viewed by those who might be interested. "His physical presence will be missed by many friends, biological family and chosen family until technology allows a future instantiation to be with us once again," Linda says.

Fred had a great first life, and I am honored to be his friend. In the picture he is wearing a shirt with "Mind uploading - the ultimate out of body experience!" I took this picture at the the Terasem monthly gathering and annual graduation in Vermont, last october. This is how I want to remember Fred, until next time: smiling, in a beautiful sunny day, full of enthusiasm for a wonderful future.

"Though I will have to carry on alone for both of us for a short while before we see each other in cyberspace, Fred is still part of all of us in the Terasem Collective Consciousness and we will continue to enjoy his warm creativity again soon as well as through his poetry and many writings," says Linda. "As they say on the Star Pebble, See you in the next cycle."

The great Truths of Terasem weekly podcasts, by Fred and Linda, is available on iTunes, and transcripts are available on the Truths of Terasem podcasts website.

We have a cure to death right here

Ken Hayworth gave an interactive online talk and Q/A in teleXLR8 on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond, on November 13 2011. See the complete report A Connectome Observatory for nanoscale brain imaging on KurzweilAI.

New technologies now permit imaging brain tissue at resolutions approaching 5x5x5nm. voxel size, down to the protein level. “This is more than sufficient resolution to determine all the connectivity and the properties of the synapses that are needed to explain the functionality of the brain circuits,” Ken said.

“In 100 years, if we have the technology to bring someone back, it won’t be in a biological body,” Ken said in a New York Times article last year. “It is these scanning techniques and mind-uploading that, I think, will bring people back. This is a taboo topic in the scientific community. But we have a cure to death right here. Why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In the Q&A, participants compared connectome preservation via the chemical brain preservation techniques proposed by Ken’s Brain Preservation Foundation to cryonics. See the full video of the talk and Q/A below.



Last year I wrote a post on Chemical brain preservation: cryonics for uploaders, also republished by the Cryonics Institute. Excerpt:

This resolution is sufficient to image the smallest brain structures which, according to current scientific knowledge, are the physical substrate of our thoughts, memories, feelings, emotional responses, hopes, dreams and identity. It is important to stress that this can be done with current technology... the information in a chemically preserved brain can be retrieved and run on a different substrate ("mind uploading"). This makes chemical brain preservation a storage technique optimized for future nanoscale scanning, and an ideal form of "cryonics for uploaders". For those who accept scanning the brain and running the information in the scan file on a different substrate as a valid form of identity preservation, chemical brain preservation seems clearly superior to cryopreservation.

After listening to Ken's talk, I am persuaded that the required brain imaging resolution can be achieved NOW with existing technology (and can only improve). So we just need to build operational pipelines for preparation, readout and storage and medical research facilities (and regulations or better absence thereof) able to preserve brains with sufficient accuracy for future readout and personality retrieval.

Ken prefers to discuss brain preservation technology as a scientific research topic instead of speculating on future availability for human patients (see his article on the Alcor Cryonics magazine and Mike Perry's reply). But in response to questions by Mike Perry and myself he said “If there was really a concerted effort to develop brain preservation technology, it would be easy to have highly reliable hospital brain preservation procedures ready to go in any hospital before the end of the decade. It is all a matter of will.”

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that we have a cure to death right here.

In memory of Robert Ettinger

Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger (4 December 1918 – 23 July 2011)

My first reaction after hearing of Bob's death and successful cryopreservation has been: "A great man has left the party. I hope to meet him at another party soon." The very fact that we, scientists and engineers who have never believed in a supernatural afterlife, dare hoping to meet Bob again, is the best tribute to him.

I have been reading the last emails of Bob to the mailing list of the Cryonics Institute. Well into his 90s and until a few weeks ago, Bob continued to write very cogent and challenging Internet posts. He started the cryonics movement, wrote three seminal books, and is now cryopreserved, with his two wives, at the Cryonics Institute that he founded. He has lived one of the fullest and richest lives that a person can ever live. And he will live again.

I never met Bob face to face, but we started exchanging emails in 2000 or 2001. In 2002 I published this Interview with Robert Ettinger. Then Bob sent me a preview of his book Youniverse, which I reviewed in Youniverse, by Robert Ettinger (Sneak Preview), published by Betterhumans. I then became a member of the Cryonics Institute and continued to exchange private and public emails with Bob until a few weeks ago.

In one of the last discussion threads he started on the Cryonics Institute mailing list, Bob said "Not long ago someone suggested that we suspend the uploading debate and just agree to disagree... Let's start by repeating that, with unimportant exceptions, a description of a thing (material object or system) is not that thing." It is well known that Bob, the father of cryonics, was not a uploading enthusiast (see also the interview above). I disagree (see my article on Chemical brain preservation: cryonics for uploaders), but when an intellectual giant like Bob says something we should at least listen to him, and I have certainly listened to Bob's objections (without changing my mind).

However, I don't see Bob's life work as limited to promoting one specific preservation technology. He is the man who introduced us all to the revolutionary and beautiful idea that, someday soon, science and technology can eliminate death. The eventual success of any personal preservation technology, be it cryopreservation, chemical brain preservation or mind uploading, will be part of Bob's heritage.

In honor to Bob, I have changed this blog's icon to a picture of a Nano Snowman.

La eternidad no empieza aquí… por ahora

lainformacion.com - La eternidad no empieza aquí… por ahora

De momento sólo existen tres empresas en el mundo que ofrezcan este tipo de servicios. Dos en EEUU, (la citada Alcor y Cryonics Institute, en Michigan) y la rusa KrioRus. A fecha de hoy, hay alrededor de 220 personas conservadas en nitrógeno líquido en alguna de estas tres instalaciones. Algunos conservan el cuerpo entero y otros solo la cabeza, con la esperanza de que la tecnología del futuro permita devolverlos a la vida...

Algunos teóricos del transhumanismo, como Giulio Prisco creen que en un futuro será posible la denominada “transferencia mental” (Mind uploading) que consistirá en escanear nuestras conexiones cerebrales y trasplantarlas a una máquina. “Nosotros somos información”, asegura Prisco, “una vez que la tecnología sea capaz de leer esta información y transferirla a otro soporte te habrás mudado desde tu cabeza a otra cosa”...

Chemical brain preservation: cryonics for uploaders

Republished in part by the Cryonics Institute (PDF)

The Brain Preservation Foundation and the Brain Preservation Technology Prize were announced at the recent H+ Summit. The week before Ken Hayworth gave a fascinating preview at the ASIM2010-1 First Online Workshop on Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds. Hayworth, a brain researcher at Harvard University, has spent years developing techniques to scan the brain and record its synaptic circuits.

The Brain Preservation Foundation has been established to promote serious scientific research in the field of brain preservation for long-term static storage. Its goal is to spur development of a hospital surgical procedure which can reliably and demonstrably preserve the structural connectivity of 99.9% of the synapses within a human brain. Existing scientific literature suggests that such a goal should be readily achievable by extending (via vascular perfusion) existing laboratory protocols for the chemical fixation and plastic-embedding of small pieces of brain tissue. If such a surgical procedure were available in hospitals it could provide interested persons a means of avoiding death and reaching the distant future. One of the first initiative of the Foundation is the Brain Preservation Technology Prize, a prize for demonstrating ultrastructure preservation across an entire large mammalian brain verified by a comprehensive electron microscopic survey procedure.

Brain preservation is a form of cryonics: preserving dead persons until future technology can restore them to life. In this sense, brain preservation is not an alternative to cryonics, but on the contrary it is conceptually equivalent to cryonics. The chemical brain preservation, or plastination, technique favored by the Brain Preservation Foundation is different from the cryopreservation technique cuttently used by the three major operational cryonics organization (Alcor, the Cryonics Institute and Kryorus), but the objectives are the same. Therefore, I think plastination should be actively investigated by cryonics service providers with the objective of including it as a supported cryonic service when the time is right. The prefix cryo- is not applicable because storing chemically preserved brains does not require ultra low temperatures, but I think the terminology should be preserved to show respect, recognition and gratitude to the cryonics community for their excellent work.

According to Hayworth, a chemically preserved, plastic-embedded brain can be losslessly subdivided in strips that can be imaged at nanometer resolution by current technology. This resolution is sufficient to image the smallest brain structures which, according to current scientific knowledge, are the physical substrate of our thoughts, memories, feelings, emotional responses, hopes, dreams and identity. It is important to stress that this can be done with current technology, and Hayworth cites experimental results to prove it.

So, where is the catch? The catch is that chemical preservation is irreversible, or at least very difficult to reverse (some skeptics think that also conventional cryonics is irreversible). But on the other hand, the information in a chemically preserved brain can be retrieved and run on a different substrate ("mind uploading"). This makes chemical brain preservation a storage technique optimized for future nanoscale scanning, and an ideal form of "cryonics for uploaders". For those who accept scanning the brain and running the information in the scan file on a different substrate as a valid form of identity preservation, chemical brain preservation seems clearly superior to cryopreservation.

I definitely belong to this group. I look forward to being extracted from my brain, leave biology behind, and run as substrate-independent software in a virtual body, roaming the universe and perhaps wearing a physical body on occasions. Mind uploading is a two steps process, 1) scanning the brain to read the information in it, and 2) running the information in the scan file (mindfile) on a suitable alternative substrate. Of course, after the first scanning step 1), the resulting mindfile can be stored until a suitable technology is available for 2). But I used to think that even developing suitable brain scanning technology would take many decades and perhaps centuries. On the contrary, I am now persuaded that chemical brain preservation may permit storing "solid mindfiles", physical databases of memory and personal identity, which future technologies will be able to ignite and bring back to life in a suitable physical substrate, in only one or two decades.

So, I will choose chemical brain preservation once it is operationally available.

Hayworth's "uploading may be only 15 years in the future" (in the sense of operational brain preservation suitable for future scanning and uploading) is very refreshing compared to the cautious, boring and defeatist attitude of today's moderate transhumanists, repented ex-transhumanists and anti-transhumanists in disguise. I feel back in the optimistic 90s, and I hope it lasts. I prefer not to discuss philosophical issues related to personal identity preservation. For me things are clear enough, and I encourage you to read Hayworth's "Killed by bad philosophy - Why brain preservation followed by mind uploading is a cure for death" for a crystal clear analysis.

Chemical brain preservation has also simple operational advantages over cryopreservation. Since it does not require especially expensive storage facilities, it can be offered at a lower price (perhaps at a much lower price). Also, it may be already covered by existing laws and regulations. If chemical preservation can be legally considered as a form of embalming, as the Body Worlds art exhibit seems to indicate, then the preparation of patients, their transport to a storage facility abroad, and running a local storage facilities, are already permitted by the law in most countries.

From the Open Letter on Brain Preservation, which you should sign now: "We accept the current scientific consensus that our unique conscious self is generated by processes within our physical brain. Further, we accept that all the memories, skills, and personality traits that make us unique are hardwired into the physical and molecular connections among our brain’s hundred billion neurons... The structural basis of memory and personality -- the synaptic connectivity between neurons -- can be preserved essentially perfectly by today’s chemical fixation and plastic embedding techniques. Extrapolating from current technologies for the nano‐imaging of plastic embedded brain tissue, we believe that one day science will have advanced sufficiently to allow complete retrieval of memories from such a preserved brain."

Some references:

Ben Goertzel on KurzweilAI: "Ken Hayworth asked in his H+ Summit talk, “Can we extract a mind from a plastic-embedded brain?” His collaborator John Smart hit the same theme — and spent most of the conference sitting in the lobby at a table raising money to pay a summer intern to help with the research. With a PhD from USC and a post-doc at Harvard, Ken isn’t exactly an amateur — but he’s looking at his field with new eyes. Plastination of body tissues was developed for other purposes (did you see the beautiful Body Worlds art exhibit?), but it may well obsolete cryopreservation, posing a lower-cost and more effective way to preserve the minds of the deceased till the Singularity when they can potentially be reanimated."

George Dvorsky: "I've often thought that cryonics, the practice of storing tissue (namely the brain) in a vat of liquid nitrogen, may eventually come to be seen as a rather primitive and naive technique for preservation... brain plastination was recently given a considerable boost through the founding of the Brain Preservation Foundation. Launched by Accelerating Studies Foundation founder John Smart and Harvard neuroscientist Ken Hayworth, the BPF is seeking to facilitate the development of any technology that will effectively preserve the brain for eventual reanimation... As for mind uploading from a plastic embedded brain, Hayworth believes that's about 50 years off."

Fibur.ru: "Is there a way to preserve your brain, and thus your identity for the future? Traditionally, some people have turned to cryonics —basically freezing their brains and bodies in a vat of liquid nitrogen with the idea that in the future nanotechnology will be able to unthaw and revive them. At the summit, John Smart, president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, announced the Brain Preservation Prize. (Disclosure: I made a $50 contribution to the foundation while at the summit.) Modeled on the X Prizes, the Brain Preservation Foundation wants to encourage researchers to develop techniques “capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable using today’s electron microscopic imaging techniques.”The idea is that the precise pattern of information in an individual’s brain constituting that person’s identity would be preserved and could be revived later by being uploaded into an advanced information technology network or perhaps a new body and brain. Although any technique could qualify for the prize, Smart evidently believes that a kind of plastination is the most likely way to go. People who attend the Body Worlds exhibition are familiar with one type of plastination that is used to preserve entire human bodies for display. One technique involves flooding a brain shortly after death with glutaraldehyde to fix proteins, followed by osmium tetroxide to stabilize lipids and other compounds. This process turns a brain into a black block of plastic that will last indefinitely. Smart was followed by Harvard researcher Kenneth Hayworth whose work focuses on using electron microscopy to delineate every synaptic connection from plastinated mouse brains. Plastination preserves both structure and molecular level information. He predicted that scientists would produce a synapse level atlas of an entire human brain over the next decade. “Can a mind be extracted from a plastic embedded brain?” ask Hayworth. “The answer is almost certainly yes.” When? In the next 50 years, predicted Hayworth."

H+ Magazine: "In the future, we might understand brain circuitry so well that such devices could be used to scan and “upload” an individual’s mind to any type of substrate (a new body, robot, or artificial environment). This Matrix-like immortality would be the ultimate backup of ourselves."

Aschwin de Wolf: "Mind uploading advocate Kenneth Hayworth has launched an interesting website devoted to the science of brain preservation. Of particular interest is his Proposal for a Brain Preservation Technology Prize (PDF). This document includes one of the most comprehensive discussions of chemopreservation as a strategy for personal survival."

Greg Jordan, in a 2008 article on Biostasis through chemopreservation: "Twenty years ago, Charles B. Olson published an article called “A Possible Cure for Death” in the journal Medical Hypotheses. In it, he favorably compares methods of chemical preservation to cryogenic preservation. Unfortunately, this article provoked no wide discussion or attempts at implementation... Chemical methods of preservation such as fixation are not only adequate, they have long been the gold standard for biologists studying the structure of cells and the brain... But what of reversibility? Olson dismisses the need for reversibility. The information in the brain can be retrieved and run on a different substrate - a new organic or machine brain.. For those who accept the method of resuscitation by scanning the brain and running it its processes on a different substrate (“mind uploading“), chemopreservation might present additional benefits. The chemopreserved brain, unlike the cryopreserved brain, is ideally suited to microscopic extraction of information."

Youniverse, by Robert Ettinger (Sneak Preview)

This article was written for Betterhumans in 2004 and edited by Betterhumans staff. I have found an online version at the Cryonics UK website and copied it here.

Youniverse, by Robert Ettinger (Sneak Preview)

Waking from cryonic suspension, you might find this a highly influential philosophy book of the early 21st century

By Giulio Prisco
Special to Betterhumans

Self-centered thinking: In his latest, yet-to-be-published book, Robert Ettinger develops a philosophy based on the principles of "me-first" and "feel-good"

The two first books of Robert Ettinger, 1962's The Prospect of Immortality and 1974's Man into Superman, started the cryonics movement. Ettinger, frequently referred to as the "founding father of cryonics," has run the Cryonics Institute since its inception, overseeing a growing number of frozen patients and hoping to restore them, sooner or later, to a longer and more interesting life in a better world. Besides running the Cryonics Institute, Ettinger has dedicated the past few decades of his long and accomplished life to developing and fine-tuning his philosophy, now explained in his new book, Youniverse.

Youniverse will hopefully be published soon, probably in 2005 as soon as a publishing deal is closed. In the meantime, Ettinger has been so kind as to email a draft to several reviewers, and the book's Website is frequently updated with news and snippets of content.

After reading the draft, and though I do not fully agree with many of Ettinger's views, I can say that this is one of the great philosophy books of all time. If you are interested in the future, or the present, Youniverse deserves a place on your bookshelf. If you are interested in the meaning of self and identity, and the nature of reality as it is being slowly and painfully uncovered by modern science, you want to have Youniverse on your bookshelf. If you are looking for a practical philosophy to establish bridges between the fundamental nature of things and how you ought to live your day-to-day life, this book is for you. And of course, anyone interested in cryonics will find here new insights, including ways to estimate the likelihood of revival for today's cryonicists.

Me-first, feel-good philosophy

The moral philosophy of Ettinger is based on two principles: "Me-first" and "feel-good." Indeed, the book is subtitled "Toward a Self Centered Philosophy." Ettinger doesn't view these two principles as unproven axioms, but rather as a straightforward consequence of human nature. "Me" is the only part of the world that we can experience directly, so "me" has to come first in our scale of values, and well-chosen objectives and goals have to lead to a state of increased "feel-good."

Ettinger demonstrates that even "altruistic" behavior can, and should, be derived from these two principles. For example, I could go for a beer instead of writing this review, and this would lead to immediate feel-good. But I believe that the memes contained in the book should be fostered, so writing the review feels better. Probably Mother Theresa spent most of her time in a state of feel-good.

Being already sold on the basics, I found more interesting the analysis of "what is me?" Having said that "me" is the most important thing in the universe, how does Ettinger define it, precisely?

In some sense, everyone knows the answer to this question: I am that person who woke up this morning with a well-defined set of memories and beliefs, including the certainty of being the continuation of the person who went to sleep last night. But Ettinger goes through a series of examples and thought experiments to show that defining self and identity can be subtler than we may think.

His examples range from simple—you come back to consciousness after surgery—to complex—you get a sufficiently complete brain scan, and after a couple of centuries your memories are uploaded and "run" on some kind of future computational device. His answers to the Big Question, "Are you still you?" in these two extreme scenarios are "definitely yes" and "probably no."

Despite being considered a visionary thinker, Ettinger often thinks as a scientist of the "old school"—in the good sense. He is always very careful to distinguish between facts and assumptions, and goes down hard on what he considers faulty reasoning—that is, logically wrong deductions or unproven assumptions. So he is not very sympathetic to "uploaders" who, equating self with information, would immediately answer "yes" to the Big Question the second scenario above. His main argument against uploaders goes like this: We know that a biological brain can be conscious, but on the basis of known facts we can only assume that a computer can be conscious, and such assumption can be wrong.

The same considerations lead him to question, in another set of examples and thought experiments, the possibility of true—conscious—artificial intelligence. To elaborate a theory of self and personal identity, Ettinger develops the concept of "self-circuit," a placeholder for a yet-to-be-discovered combination of information and wetware that generates and holds consciousness.

Bad assumptions

Of course, Ettinger is quite right in reminding us that we should not draw conclusions from unproven assumptions, yet I think that overall he applies this principle too strictly. For example, thinking that I will wake up tomorrow morning is an unproven assumption. Yet on the basis of my current state of health and my estimate of the probability of being killed tonight, I feel that I can make good decisions based on this assumption.

Similarly, it is true that since I have never seen a conscious computer program I can only assume that one may exist, yet it seems to me a reasonable assumption, coherent with many facts and with the general worldview that I have developed on their basis. If in a few decades we develop technology with the capability to acquire a sufficiently complete brain scan (whatever this means in quantitative terms) for future uploading, I think I will be willing to give it a try.

I think that part of the problem stems from Ettinger being too protective of cryonics as the only practical means to survive until a scheme for immortality in a biological body is found. I intend to be cryonically preserved after death as I think it is the best bet available today and for the foreseeable future (indeed, I am a member of the Cryonics Institute), but I would also bet that sooner or later technology will allow us to make backup softcopies of humans. To another big question, "If you run two copies of one's mind, which one is the continuation of the conscious original?" I would answer, "Both" and I do not think that this poses a big philosophical problem.

And surprisingly for someone who attacks unproven assumptions with such vigor, Ettinger makes some big assumptions of his own. He has built the Cryonics Institute as a US organization, and its frozen patients are stored in the US. He places his trust in the hope that US federal and local administrations will remain sufficiently open-minded about cryonics until today's patients are restored to life. In view of the sad advantage acquired by fundamentalists and apologists of death in shaping US policies, I am afraid that his trust is misplaced—in other words, he is basing too much on an unproven assumption—and that the cryonics industry needs a bit of geographic diversification, the development of cryonics facilities in other countries that could be used as a backup solution should the US turn into a cryonics-unfriendly territory. I think that this should be a priority for the international cryonics movement.

Deep thoughts with a southern twang

Still, Ettinger has managed to produce an accessible book with much range and depth. Readers who dislike slogging through heavy philosophical jargon will be pleased that he always uses simple and plain language, at times decorated with southern slang. It is evident that he aims to make his philosophy understandable to everyone.

I am sure that after publication, Youniverse will be used as a rich source of quotes and one-liners to counter the "wisdom" of anti-progress "thinkers" such as Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama ("the apologists of death") who have recently acquired, very unfortunately, a disproportionate influence on contemporary US media and policymakers. "Leon, dear boy, if you want to suffer and die, feel free," Ettinger writes. "Ordinary people usually find it simple to choose between life and death." Ettinger also refers to "a new type of vermin or parasite, the self-styled bioethicist, who has nothing useful to contribute, but finds a comfortable parasitical niche complaining about the ethics of extending and improving human life."

Youniverse is also full of interesting and thought-provoking analyses of side issues. For example, mathematicians will be interested in the chapter on the "paradoxes" of logic and the more detailed analysis of Goedel's incompleteness theorem (not a big issue, according to Ettinger), and physicists will be interested in the chapter on quantum physics and its various interpretations.

While the book does have some shortcomings—in his brief history of philosophical thought, for example, Ettinger bashes nearly all previous thinkers, including some who deserve better—it also has much to recommend it. I am confident that I will wake up from cryonic sleep to find out that Youniverse is recognized as one of the more influential philosophy books of the early 21st century.

Interview with Robert Ettinger (March 2002)

I copied here this old interview, published on the Transhumanity Magazine of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity +) in March 2002 (link).

Giulio Prisco, March 22, 2002

We offer you this interview with Robert Ettinger, the visionary thinker and writer who, with his two seminal works "The Prospect of Immortality" and "Man into Superman", contributed to building strong foundations for modern transhumanist thinking. Bob is also the pragmatic businessman who founded the Cryonics Institute and kept it afloat in difficult times. The Cryonics Institute is today one of the two major cryonics service providers. In this interview we discuss Bob's views on the status of cryonics today, mind uploading, and the problem of identity. Please see the web site of the Cryonics Institute (http://www.cryonics.org) for more information.

Q - "By working hard and saving my money, I intend to become an immortal superman". This first line from the preface to "Man into Superman" is frequently quoted as a great opening line, but is it to be taken seriously? Do you really think that we, here and now, have the option to become immortal supermen?

A - It was a bad line--and a bad book--from the standpoint of selling cryonics. Most people think radical change is either impossible or frightening. Even "immortality" sounds too grandiose, although I use it merely in the sense of eliminating "natural" death. But it is true that, if we live long enough, radical change is almost certain.

Q - Now many have heard of cryonics, but it was not so when you wrote "The Prospect of Immortality" in 1962. Did you develop your ideas entirely by yourself, or did you use the work of earlier scientists and writers? What were your sources?

A - I believe I was the first to put it all together in an organized way, but of course there were many precursors. In particular, suspended animation is an old theme, at least in fiction. Reversal of aging had rarely been taken seriously. The relativity of death, and sub-micro repair capabilities, were also ideas seldom encountered.

Q - Your wife is cryonically suspended, and you have declared your intention to also be "frozen". Do you believe you will see her again? When?

A - Actually, both my wives are among our patients now. I think we have a good chance of revival within 50-200 years. And to the inevitable question of what happens if all three of us are revived, I usually remind people of the old saying--the rich have their problems and the poor have their problems, but the rich have a better class of problems. If we are all revived, I will consider that a very high class problem.

Q - Since you founded the Cryonics Institute, it has grown into one of the two main cryonics service providers, the other being Alcor. In one sentence, how would you differentiate your service offering from Alcor's?

A - That's a complicated question, and I'll just refer the readers to our web site, where we discuss it in detail (www.cryonics.org). This is a rapidly changing arena. CI is the only cryonics organization with a full time professional cryobiologist (Dr. Yuri Pichugin) as director of research.

Q - The Cryonics Institute charges 28.000 US dollars for full suspension to life members. What are the hidden costs? Is there a catch?

A - No hidden costs. About $20,000 of the suspension fee is invested to produce income for long term maintenance. (We also have other sources of revenue.) At revival time, that $20,000 will be freed up for revival and rehabilitation, and we expect our general resources to increase over time as well.

Q - Why don't you offer a cheaper head only option?

A - We think the "neuro" option is a negative for public relations, and in many cases for prospective members' intra-family relations.

Q - Your operating model is having on call teams and funeral houses able to ensure the short response times required. Have you thought of alternatives, for example a hospital for terminally ill patients with on site cryonic suspension facilities and personnel?

A - The closest we can come to that at present is to have the patient die under hospice care, which works very well.

Q - What happens to suspended patients if the Cryonics Institute has to cease its activities due to financial problems?

A - We are probably the soundest financially of all the organizations. In unforeseen emergencies or contingencies we will just do the best we can for the patients. I cannot envision any realistic scenario that would shut us down, short of nuclear war or a plague.

Q - It has been said that funding cryonic suspension with an insurance policy can be a problem for Europeans. Do you think this is true? Does the Cryonics Institute accept funding by non US insurance companies? Can Europeans choose any insurance company, or must it be a company that has specific agreements with the Cryonics Institute?

A - No problem that we have encountered so far, and no agreement between CI and the insurance company needed. (Alcor for a while refused to accept foreign insurance, but has reversed course on that.)

Q - Anther worry for Europeans is the time between death and the arrival of a qualified cryonic team. In Europe you rely on the services of a funeral house in London. Can you confirm that they can fly anywhere in Europe with a few hours notice?

A - Albin's can usually get anywhere in Europe within a few hours, if previous arrangements have been made. Local funeral directors can also be lined up. There is also a British volunteer group that can help in some cases.

Q - I believe European branches of a cryonics service provider, physically located in the country and familiar with the local medical and legal systems, could do much to facilitate solving these and other problems. Does the Cryonics Institute have any plans to establish European branches?

A - Volume will not support a storage facility in Europe any time soon. Initial preparation facilities do exist as previously mentioned, and will be improved from time to time.

Q - Do you think "The First Immortal" by J. Halperin gives a realistic account of how things may be? Do you recommend reading the book to those who are considering cryonics? What other fiction would you recommend?

A - His treatment of the (then) present was well researched. His conjectures about the future were reasonable but of course still conjectures. There have been countless books and stories involving cryonics, a few of them centered on cryonics. One of the most recent is PALMER LAKE, a murder mystery by Thomas C. McCollum III (Shoji Books, Charlottesville VA).

Q - In "Man into Superman" (1972) you were already thinking of the concept that is now described as "mind uploading". Referring to suggestions made by Arthur Clarke, you wrote "human personalities will be copied and stored electronically, perhaps in several locations, conferring essential immortality and near invulnerability", but then expressed your lack of enthousiasm for this concept: "... assuming that identity is preserved when this is far from clear". Did you do any further thinking in the last 30 years? What is "identity"?

A - The problem of identity, or criteria of survival, has not been solved. I doubt that a computer could live (have subjective experiences), but the discussion is a long one. Yes, I have written a good deal on that in recent years.

Q - Even with no evidence, I am willing to bet that identity (whatever that is) is preserved by "running" a brain scan sufficiently complete. I also think that while the technology to "run" the brain scan may not be available for some decades, the technology to acquire it may be available much sooner, perhaps in one decade. So can brain mapping develop into a viable alternative to cryonics?

A - See above. It's possible, but in my opinion unlikely, even in principle.

Q - Will the Cryonics Institute offer brain mapping/storage services when the technology becomes available, perhaps as an add on to cryonics services?

A - That's not something we worry about now.

Q - Your life work has been dedicated to ensuring the survival of the self after death, using technologies available today. Did you stop to think that perhaps the survival of the self is already ensured, either by some unknown natural mechanism or by the purposeful intervention of a future "Omega Point" civilization able to exploit vastly superior technologies to reach into the past and "rescue" stranded minds?

A - I have discussed many of these possibilities in various venues, and in my book in progress, YOUNIVERSE. Some scientists believe that "you" are already immortal, with many versions of you alive right now, and in the past and future, in various forms or in various "universes." But these ideas remain speculative, while cryonics is by comparison down-to-earth practical.

Q - I hear you are writing a new book. What can you tell us about it?

A - It is primarily a book of philosophy in the classic sense, which has never heretofore been realized--viz., to provide personal guidance based on rigorous science.

After the interview Bob Ettinger sent the short note below to clarify his views on the problem of identity:

In preface, if you were vaporized in an explosion, but then somehow rebuilt with high fidelity, would "you" survive? There is no agreement--plenty of opinions, but no proof one way or the other. Maybe the question itself has little meaning. It's just too soon to be sure. Involved are questions about the nature of time and other hard problems.

But today's topic is whether "you" could survive as a computer simulation or emulation, and the case for this is much weaker--so weak that I think the answer is almost surely negative. In a nutshell, the negative case can be made in either of the following two summaries:

1. The map is not the territory.

2. A description of a thing (or an event) is not the same as the thing or event itself, and not "just as good" except for limited applications.

A map may be just a piece of paper with some marks on it. The marks can be interpreted to provide information about the corresponding territory. In some cases, the map is better than the territory--e.g. if you are traveling by car, a map is more useful than an aerial view of the terrain, since the aerial view has no street labels etc. But no matter how detailed the map is, or how often it is updated, it is not the same as the territory; you can't walk or live in it. (Yes, extremists may claim that a "map person" or description of a person could "live" in a map, but that is just an empty assertion.)

A computer simulation or emulation of a person is very much like this. All the digital computer does is generate successive sets of numbers, which can be interpreted as descriptions of a person and his activities and even feelings. But no matter how detailed and faithful, it is still just a description. A Mickey Mouse cartoon shows "feelings" on a character's face, but the character as well as the feeling is counterfeit.

Now the extreme position of the "uploaders" or "isomorphists" is that correspondence (isomorphism) is everything--nothing matters except relationships between symbols. A pool of water simulated in a computer won't get you wet, but it will seem wet to a simulated person, they say. But this is only a conjecture or postulate, not proof of anything.

There are many other problems with the isomorphist position, of which I'll mention just one before stopping. That is the nature of qualia or feelings or subjective experiences. The essence of life as we know it is in feeling, the capability of subjective experience.

Its anatomy/physiology are not yet known; it is in some subset or aspect of the brain and its activities. But it clearly must bind (span) space and time; a quale cannot exist at a geometrical point or an instant in time. Possibly it is something like a modulated standing wave of some sort. But until we know what it is, it is premature to assume that it can be duplicated outside of organic matter, let alone as an abstraction in a computer.

We can speculate until the cows come home, and one speculation is that we are right now just simulations in some super-being's computer. (There are ways to check on that, however.) But common sense dictates we use what is likeliest and easiest, and that means to try to save yourselves through cryonics, not vague hopes of uploading.