I recently discovered The Brain Science Podcast and have been going through the archives on my iPod. Quite an intriguing mix of shows/topics/guests. Fairly layperson-accessible without being dumb or fluffy. Host Dr. Ginger Campbell is very pleasantly down to earth for the most part, and doesn't come across as smarmy.
A few of the episodes (e.g. this one where the guest sounds a little overconfident about his favored technique) I've listened to so far have had a tinge of overblown self-promotion to them, and some of the topics are a bit on the "pop science" side, but other than that I've been pretty darn impressed, both by the overall quality of the topics discussed and the overall no-frills approach of the show.
I've listened to some podcasts ostensibly related to brains and cognition and such that are just...well, let's just say that they seem to have ZERO standards for who they interview.
And while I'm all for engaging with "fringe" viewpoints (let me tell you, all those insomniac adolescent nights of listening to Coast to Coast AM were great for practicing critical thinking!), ye gads, there's only so much "and today we have an interview with Lady Rainbow Moonflower Cleopatra who is a neo-shamanistic dreamwork holistic crystal therapist who discovered through the power of Dynamic Positive Imaging that she is actually the quantum reincarnation of Pikachu!" I can take.
Too much of that sort of thing and my brain starts to feel like I've eaten nothing but candy corn and Pop-Tarts for the past week. Whereas a steady diet of information and discussion from people who, you know, actually care about finding out stuff about actual reality is much more satisfying.
In any case, key things I've appreciated about the Brain Science Podcast include: an emphasis on embodiment as being a critical aspect of cognition (very refreshing!), interviews with people doing actual research (like one scientist who has spent 35 years just studying one aspect of the lobster brain!), and a reasonably straightforward format.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
"But Why Would You Want To Label Yourself Like That?"
It was one of those moments in which I knew I had to choose between either disclosing (and accepting whatever consequences that entailed) or letting a communication breakdown degrade into something potentially much worse.
Given that I'd been down the ugly road of mounting mutual misconceptions numerous times, with no good ever coming of it, I went for disclosure on that occasion.
The result was...interesting. Not wonderful, not totally horrible, but not particularly good either. And definitely symptomatic of the tremendous amount of ignorance that persists regarding autistic persons, particularly when we happen to no longer be children.
My guess is that autistic persons find ourselves in this situation frequently, whether it be at work, at school, or in any other context entailing non-superficial interaction with others. Sometimes it's a matter of us being faced with the question of whether to disclose for ourselves; other times it's a matter of a parent or partner or someone else who is with us having to make that decision.
But in any case, it is definitely not an easy situation to navigate. And in fact, sometimes our experiences with disclosure can be so awful that we're left back where we were before we even had the information and insight necessary to even attempt disclosure in the first place.
One thing that would help make disclosure more of a useful exercise than an exercise in frustration would be for people to make fewer assumptions about what it means for someone to disclose something like autism. In these situations, the logical thing to do would be to avoid making assumptions and perhaps try to learn a little more about the person you are dealing with -- but unfortunately this is not the most common default response.
When I made the aforementioned disclosure, the response I initially got was something along the lines of, "Oh, why do you want to put a label on yourself?" This was followed by a series of attempts at "reassuring" me of my abilities in various areas (which baffled me as I never once claimed to have no abilities).
And...whatever the intention of these "reassurances", their effect and ultimate implication was anything but reassuring.
Put simply, their effect was dismissive and their implication was that the other person already knew everything he needed to know about me in order to make his judgment -- that judgment being, of course, that I just needed to try harder to do something in the standard way. Even though for that particular task, the standard way was totally inaccessible to me.
And it wasn't as if I hadn't completed the task per its requirements -- I had in fact done this, and I'd done it thoroughly.
So, what was the problem?
Well, essentially the problem had to do with the fact that writing and speech are two different things. My assignment had been, "Provide information about X to Person Y, and copy Person Q when you send the information". I'd done this via e-mail and Person Y had not complained.
Person Q, on the other hand, decided that he wanted a verbal summary of what I'd written. He did not seem to be able to grok that providing him with a verbal summary would require me to find some way to quickly make the material I'd written about accessible to my "speech circuits". And so when I balked at giving him a verbal summary (and he did not seem to even like my suggestion that I come and read him what I'd written verbatim), he got very exasperated. As far as I could tell, he thought I was just being lazy or stubborn or otherwise unreasonable.
So, we're back at the beginning now: at that point, my choice was either to let Person Q go on figuring I was some sort of bizarre prima-donna, or tell him the truth, which was that what he was asking of me literally wouldn't accomplish anything useful.
Very often I can write about something long before I can talk about it aloud; much of the stuff I say aloud (especially if I sound "articulate" in doing so) is stuff I've written about. I've got gigantic text files on my home computer that nobody ever sees, which I just use for processing thoughts into words.
Put simply, my spoken communication -- at least my spoken coherent communication -- sometimes greatly lags what I can do in writing at any given time. And trying to force speech when it isn't ready to come out never leads to anything good -- at best it leads to rambling associative tangents, and at worst (and I have plenty of experience with "at worst") it leads to full-on crying meltdowns, and exits that look a lot more dramatic than I'd like them to, considering by the point that happens I'm generally wishing very much to be invisible.
And...the only thing I've ever, ever found to work in permitting me to use speech communicatively, especially in cases when it really matters that the information I'm meant to convey is accurate, is a combination of writing and time. Which of course means that if someone wants something out of me fast, they're better off just letting me type it.
This isn't 100% true for all autistic people, all the time. But it's true for me, and it was true for me before I'd even heard of autism, let alone been diagnosed on the spectrum. All diagnosis did was put things into context. And that contextualization can be a useful and valuable tool -- so long as it isn't dismissed as merely a matter of my "using a label to limit myself" or something similarly disparaging.
Mind you, I don't think Person Q meant any harm. More likely, he was genuinely baffled by the fact that someone he knew could do this and that thing just fine was "refusing" to do something else which to him seemed totally trivial. And I'm also sure he meant well when he tried to (as he saw it) "encourage [me] to step out of [my] comfort zone". But regardless of what he meant, his comments didn't help me, nor did they get the task accomplished the way he would have preferred.
Now, I know disclosure doesn't have to go badly.
I was in another situation, another time, wherein again I found myself having to either disclose or experience Serious Badness. And that time, the person's response was more along the lines of, "Oh, wow, thanks for telling me, that makes [Anne's seemingly strange reactions to 'mundane' thing] a lot less confusing."
Later I found out that this person actually had an autistic child, and so at the very least she had some experience with the territory. There definitely seems to be a correlation between information (and a willingness to learn and accept new information) and how well someone reacts to a disclosure.
And...all that said, this isn't all just about disclosure.
Disclosure is only an example of a particular issue that can come up for autistic people, regardless of whether we choose to use the word "autism" specifically, or refer generically to "disability", or even just describe our particular individual quirks and processing differences in more precise terms.
What issue is this?
Well, essentially it is the idea that by refusing to acknowledge something (whether in the form of a "label" or even just a description), you can somehow make it go away.
(Side note: I tried for years to avoid acknowledging anything "different" about my configuration; this simply and utterly did not work, and many things in my life consistently went wrong and undone until I got over myself and acknowledged certain things were true.)
This is closely related to (and often goes along with) the idea that anyone who attempts to describe a non-standard configuration or processing feature they happen to have is either Just Trying To Be Special And Different, or Just Trying To Be Lazy And Make Excuses, or some variation on those themes.
(This is not to say that autistic people are categorically immune to excuse-making -- we definitely aren't -- but it is inappropriate and patronizing to just assume someone is making an excuse because they are trying to explain something about themselves indicating an atypical configuration.)
Whether this is because behaviorism had too much influence on common thought a few decades ago, or whether people just find difference terribly inconvenient to work into their worldview, it's hard to say, but regardless, I can think of few things more confounding than the insistence made by some that only two types of people -- typical and "broken" -- exist.
This forces people to either try their best to act in typical ways even when doing so is unhealthy (and often ultimately unsustainable), or to accept a self-concept that often entails a tremendous amount of woe-is-me thinking regarding their configuration.
In truth, this is a false dichotomy.
In truth, there ought to be a general acknowledgment that everyone benefits when educational, social, occupational, and other opportunities are made more flexible and inclusive.
But in order for that acknowledgment to proliferate, individual people need to work toward checking their knee-jerk assumptions upon encountering atypical configurations and the people who live with them all the time regardless of whether or not they are named.
Given that I'd been down the ugly road of mounting mutual misconceptions numerous times, with no good ever coming of it, I went for disclosure on that occasion.
The result was...interesting. Not wonderful, not totally horrible, but not particularly good either. And definitely symptomatic of the tremendous amount of ignorance that persists regarding autistic persons, particularly when we happen to no longer be children.
My guess is that autistic persons find ourselves in this situation frequently, whether it be at work, at school, or in any other context entailing non-superficial interaction with others. Sometimes it's a matter of us being faced with the question of whether to disclose for ourselves; other times it's a matter of a parent or partner or someone else who is with us having to make that decision.
But in any case, it is definitely not an easy situation to navigate. And in fact, sometimes our experiences with disclosure can be so awful that we're left back where we were before we even had the information and insight necessary to even attempt disclosure in the first place.
One thing that would help make disclosure more of a useful exercise than an exercise in frustration would be for people to make fewer assumptions about what it means for someone to disclose something like autism. In these situations, the logical thing to do would be to avoid making assumptions and perhaps try to learn a little more about the person you are dealing with -- but unfortunately this is not the most common default response.
When I made the aforementioned disclosure, the response I initially got was something along the lines of, "Oh, why do you want to put a label on yourself?" This was followed by a series of attempts at "reassuring" me of my abilities in various areas (which baffled me as I never once claimed to have no abilities).
And...whatever the intention of these "reassurances", their effect and ultimate implication was anything but reassuring.
Put simply, their effect was dismissive and their implication was that the other person already knew everything he needed to know about me in order to make his judgment -- that judgment being, of course, that I just needed to try harder to do something in the standard way. Even though for that particular task, the standard way was totally inaccessible to me.
And it wasn't as if I hadn't completed the task per its requirements -- I had in fact done this, and I'd done it thoroughly.
So, what was the problem?
Well, essentially the problem had to do with the fact that writing and speech are two different things. My assignment had been, "Provide information about X to Person Y, and copy Person Q when you send the information". I'd done this via e-mail and Person Y had not complained.
Person Q, on the other hand, decided that he wanted a verbal summary of what I'd written. He did not seem to be able to grok that providing him with a verbal summary would require me to find some way to quickly make the material I'd written about accessible to my "speech circuits". And so when I balked at giving him a verbal summary (and he did not seem to even like my suggestion that I come and read him what I'd written verbatim), he got very exasperated. As far as I could tell, he thought I was just being lazy or stubborn or otherwise unreasonable.
So, we're back at the beginning now: at that point, my choice was either to let Person Q go on figuring I was some sort of bizarre prima-donna, or tell him the truth, which was that what he was asking of me literally wouldn't accomplish anything useful.
Very often I can write about something long before I can talk about it aloud; much of the stuff I say aloud (especially if I sound "articulate" in doing so) is stuff I've written about. I've got gigantic text files on my home computer that nobody ever sees, which I just use for processing thoughts into words.
Put simply, my spoken communication -- at least my spoken coherent communication -- sometimes greatly lags what I can do in writing at any given time. And trying to force speech when it isn't ready to come out never leads to anything good -- at best it leads to rambling associative tangents, and at worst (and I have plenty of experience with "at worst") it leads to full-on crying meltdowns, and exits that look a lot more dramatic than I'd like them to, considering by the point that happens I'm generally wishing very much to be invisible.
And...the only thing I've ever, ever found to work in permitting me to use speech communicatively, especially in cases when it really matters that the information I'm meant to convey is accurate, is a combination of writing and time. Which of course means that if someone wants something out of me fast, they're better off just letting me type it.
This isn't 100% true for all autistic people, all the time. But it's true for me, and it was true for me before I'd even heard of autism, let alone been diagnosed on the spectrum. All diagnosis did was put things into context. And that contextualization can be a useful and valuable tool -- so long as it isn't dismissed as merely a matter of my "using a label to limit myself" or something similarly disparaging.
Mind you, I don't think Person Q meant any harm. More likely, he was genuinely baffled by the fact that someone he knew could do this and that thing just fine was "refusing" to do something else which to him seemed totally trivial. And I'm also sure he meant well when he tried to (as he saw it) "encourage [me] to step out of [my] comfort zone". But regardless of what he meant, his comments didn't help me, nor did they get the task accomplished the way he would have preferred.
Now, I know disclosure doesn't have to go badly.
I was in another situation, another time, wherein again I found myself having to either disclose or experience Serious Badness. And that time, the person's response was more along the lines of, "Oh, wow, thanks for telling me, that makes [Anne's seemingly strange reactions to 'mundane' thing] a lot less confusing."
Later I found out that this person actually had an autistic child, and so at the very least she had some experience with the territory. There definitely seems to be a correlation between information (and a willingness to learn and accept new information) and how well someone reacts to a disclosure.
And...all that said, this isn't all just about disclosure.
Disclosure is only an example of a particular issue that can come up for autistic people, regardless of whether we choose to use the word "autism" specifically, or refer generically to "disability", or even just describe our particular individual quirks and processing differences in more precise terms.
What issue is this?
Well, essentially it is the idea that by refusing to acknowledge something (whether in the form of a "label" or even just a description), you can somehow make it go away.
(Side note: I tried for years to avoid acknowledging anything "different" about my configuration; this simply and utterly did not work, and many things in my life consistently went wrong and undone until I got over myself and acknowledged certain things were true.)
This is closely related to (and often goes along with) the idea that anyone who attempts to describe a non-standard configuration or processing feature they happen to have is either Just Trying To Be Special And Different, or Just Trying To Be Lazy And Make Excuses, or some variation on those themes.
(This is not to say that autistic people are categorically immune to excuse-making -- we definitely aren't -- but it is inappropriate and patronizing to just assume someone is making an excuse because they are trying to explain something about themselves indicating an atypical configuration.)
Whether this is because behaviorism had too much influence on common thought a few decades ago, or whether people just find difference terribly inconvenient to work into their worldview, it's hard to say, but regardless, I can think of few things more confounding than the insistence made by some that only two types of people -- typical and "broken" -- exist.
This forces people to either try their best to act in typical ways even when doing so is unhealthy (and often ultimately unsustainable), or to accept a self-concept that often entails a tremendous amount of woe-is-me thinking regarding their configuration.
In truth, this is a false dichotomy.
In truth, there ought to be a general acknowledgment that everyone benefits when educational, social, occupational, and other opportunities are made more flexible and inclusive.
But in order for that acknowledgment to proliferate, individual people need to work toward checking their knee-jerk assumptions upon encountering atypical configurations and the people who live with them all the time regardless of whether or not they are named.
Monday, April 13, 2009
On Consequences vs. Intentions
A bit of language-communication-deconstruction inspired by various recent mailing-list and comment thread goings-on, in which I've personally said little but observed a fair amount. And if you think you personally inspired this post you are almost certainly wrong, as I wrote it only after observing a lot of different conversations in a lot of different places, to the point where I believe I've detected a pattern but couldn't extrapolate out who exactly said what when and where even if I wanted to.
I've noticed that misunderstandings abound whenever you have one (or more) people focusing on consequences in their statements, and one or more other people focusing on intentions in their statements.
Very often, it seems that when Person 1 points out the potential (or actual) consequences of something, they are interpreted as telling Person 2 what their intentions and thoughts are.
And then subsequent exchanges consist of Person 1 expressing great confusion at why Person 2 is so upset, and Person 2 getting more and more upset as they perceive Person 1 to be ignoring their feelings.
Sometimes this even leads to Person 2 actually going back and trying to tell Person 1 what their intentions are (or at least, telling them a lot of things that look like that), because they feel like that's what was done to them in the first place.
And...when I see this sort of thing going on, I honestly have no clue whether it's even possible to participate usefully in the discussion (which is one reason I don't participate much in long, heated discussion threads).
If I say:
"Look, Person 2, Person 1 didn't mean to accuse you of X, he was just trying to point out the consequences of what you wrote",
...is Person 2 going to find that helpful, or are they going to think I am "teaming up" with Person 1 and claiming their (Person 2's) feelings don't matter?
And if I say:
"Look, Person 1, when you used this sort of language to point out the consequences of Person 2's statement, they took it as a personal accusation of bad faith, despite any disclaimers you might have applied, because they are accustomed to only seeing language like that used when an actual accusation of bad faith is taking place",
...is Person 1 going to appreciate that, or just figure it's a matter of people reading too much of the wrong things into what they're saying?
I probably have a slight personal bias toward Person 1 (as in, I tend to be a consequence-pointer-outer myself, and have been misunderstood many times because of this, and I tend to find people who themselves make a practice of pointing out consequences easier to read) but I try not to translate that bias into anything that stops me from seeing why people might be reacting the way they are to a statement.
In other words, I don't think there's any basis for saying either Person 1 or Person 2 is "always in the right" in any universally generalizable sense (and of course there's the fact that the Person 1 and Person 2 roles can "switch" multiple times in a conversation, depending on the direction it takes).
But I do think it can be said that when you think someone is accusing you of being a bad person, or of doing something bad on purpose, it would probably be a good idea to look more carefully at what they're saying before responding. They might just be trying to tell you that what you're doing could lead (or has lead in the past) to particular negative consequences.
And, conversely, I think it's a good idea to (if you are a consequence-pointer-outer) understand that some people are really sensitive to wording and phrasing, and will literally not understand what you mean if you don't explicitly point out that you are trying to discuss potential/actual consequences, rather than Make The Other Person Feel Bad. (And I am not saying that people ought to be "babied", just that some might not have yet grasped that there's even a difference between talking about intentions and talking about consequences.)
I've noticed that misunderstandings abound whenever you have one (or more) people focusing on consequences in their statements, and one or more other people focusing on intentions in their statements.
Very often, it seems that when Person 1 points out the potential (or actual) consequences of something, they are interpreted as telling Person 2 what their intentions and thoughts are.
And then subsequent exchanges consist of Person 1 expressing great confusion at why Person 2 is so upset, and Person 2 getting more and more upset as they perceive Person 1 to be ignoring their feelings.
Sometimes this even leads to Person 2 actually going back and trying to tell Person 1 what their intentions are (or at least, telling them a lot of things that look like that), because they feel like that's what was done to them in the first place.
And...when I see this sort of thing going on, I honestly have no clue whether it's even possible to participate usefully in the discussion (which is one reason I don't participate much in long, heated discussion threads).
If I say:
"Look, Person 2, Person 1 didn't mean to accuse you of X, he was just trying to point out the consequences of what you wrote",
...is Person 2 going to find that helpful, or are they going to think I am "teaming up" with Person 1 and claiming their (Person 2's) feelings don't matter?
And if I say:
"Look, Person 1, when you used this sort of language to point out the consequences of Person 2's statement, they took it as a personal accusation of bad faith, despite any disclaimers you might have applied, because they are accustomed to only seeing language like that used when an actual accusation of bad faith is taking place",
...is Person 1 going to appreciate that, or just figure it's a matter of people reading too much of the wrong things into what they're saying?
I probably have a slight personal bias toward Person 1 (as in, I tend to be a consequence-pointer-outer myself, and have been misunderstood many times because of this, and I tend to find people who themselves make a practice of pointing out consequences easier to read) but I try not to translate that bias into anything that stops me from seeing why people might be reacting the way they are to a statement.
In other words, I don't think there's any basis for saying either Person 1 or Person 2 is "always in the right" in any universally generalizable sense (and of course there's the fact that the Person 1 and Person 2 roles can "switch" multiple times in a conversation, depending on the direction it takes).
But I do think it can be said that when you think someone is accusing you of being a bad person, or of doing something bad on purpose, it would probably be a good idea to look more carefully at what they're saying before responding. They might just be trying to tell you that what you're doing could lead (or has lead in the past) to particular negative consequences.
And, conversely, I think it's a good idea to (if you are a consequence-pointer-outer) understand that some people are really sensitive to wording and phrasing, and will literally not understand what you mean if you don't explicitly point out that you are trying to discuss potential/actual consequences, rather than Make The Other Person Feel Bad. (And I am not saying that people ought to be "babied", just that some might not have yet grasped that there's even a difference between talking about intentions and talking about consequences.)
Sunday, April 12, 2009
What Each Of Us Notices: April Edition
Pictures from today. Not feeling wordy at the moment.
Toby (found as a tiny, runny-nosed kitten last year in my SO's parents' yard) is now about 11 months old, beautiful, healthy, and very much her own person!
Layers and symmetry in three dimensions.
Colors and chaos in iron oxide.
Wood, metal shapes, and light.
Toby (found as a tiny, runny-nosed kitten last year in my SO's parents' yard) is now about 11 months old, beautiful, healthy, and very much her own person!
Layers and symmetry in three dimensions.
Colors and chaos in iron oxide.
Wood, metal shapes, and light.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Cryonics, Redux
Thanks to everyone who commented on my recent post on cryonics. Interesting discussion all around, and I've definitely been able to clarify my views on the subject a bit subsequently. I think it's good for people to be able to discuss this kind of thing outside the context of "echo chambers" where everyone already agrees, and also outside the context of either wildly speculative futurism or outright dismissal.
(I actually find a fair bit of discussion, even on subjects I'm really interested in, somewhat inaccessible due to copious use of widgets, so I am glad there is at least some non-widgety conversation to be had (or at least people who can deal with non-widgetiness on my end).)
So I'm going to attempt to explain my views as they (albeit by no means immovably) stand now, and hopefully this explanation makes sense.
Certainly, people have made some pretty wild claims about cryonics, and there's been a lot of over-hyping of its potential, and it's a subject around which one must be extremely careful (that is, presuming one wants to avoid falling into crackpot wishful-thinking traps).
However: if you can manage to scrape away enough of the subcultural detritus and personality artifacts that have glommed onto cryonics over the years, what you're left with is:
(a) an experiment in tissue preservation,
(b) the idea that future technology may someday be able to repair injury and illness not addressable by today's medicine, and
(c) a view of death as a process rather than a discrete event.
None of these things seem to me particularly irrational or farfetched in and of themselves.
Of course in reality you can't actually ignore the cultural connotations and fringe entanglements of something like cryonics. These things must be acknowledged and addressed if one wants to actually have a clear view of the subject, and that's part of what I am trying to do here.
E.g., I think the notion of cryonics has been harmed by assertions that it's a means to (even potentially) "buy immortality". Immortality, after all, is incoherent -- nobody knows how long they or anyone else is going to live, and it might end up being a pretty long time, but it sure as heck isn't going to be forever, any more than having a job gives you a shot at making Infinity Zillion Dollars.
(It's not that I'm pessimistic, it's that some things that work on paper turn to dust when you try and force-fit them into the real world, and I'm pretty darn sure "immortality" is one of these things, as it essentially requires that biological entities be transmuted into perpetual-motion machines.)
But when it comes to item (a) above, which amounts to the question of "might it be possible to vitrify and later de-vitrify (and reanimate) a mammal?", there you at least have something concrete you can test. Such an experiment would be perfectly at home in the realm of cryobiology (though cryonics and cryobiology are not one and the same). So as far as "intriguing fringe ideas" go, cryonics actually comes out ahead in my book, for the mere fact of actually having a significant testable component.
The issue I think most people (and I do count myself in this category here) have difficulty with when considering cryonics as a concept relates to its built-in speculative component, (b): that of the notion of eventually repairing presently-fatal pathology with as-yet-nonexistent technology.
It requires a certain sort of mindset to take the idea of future reparative technologies (not to mention a future culture where reanimating cryonics patients is considered a good and proper thing to do) seriously enough to actually consider signing up for cryonics a worthwhile act. And to the extent that this mindset is entangled with things even more marginal than cryonics (and note that by "marginal" I don't mean "unpopular with the intellectual elite/cultural mainstream" but rather "removed from concrete reality by greater than two or so degrees"), you can count me among its critics.
However, I see a significant difference between the "just dip the person in liquid nitrogen, and maybe someday the nanobots will be able to put him back together" scenario, and the "vitrify the person so as to minimize cellular damage and maybe someday we'll be able to devitrify her and take care of that pesky tumor" scenario. Clearly some scenarios associated with cryonics (and perhaps the majority up until fairly recently) have been ridiculous. But I don't think they're all ridiculous. The details matter.
As for (c), viewing death as a (potentially interruptible) process rather than an event, this is not unique to cryonics by any means. Wikipedia has this to say regarding death (emphasis mine):
So, in other words, "death" in real life is not the cartoon image of a person's ghost or soul abruptly and forever leaving the body; it's more complicated than that, and the process is more drawn out, and has even changed definitions multiple times throughout history. Hence the idea that if death is in fact a process, if we can find some way to halt the process before critical brain structures are destroyed forever, there might be some chance of bringing the person back.
A Tentative and Cautious Enthusiasm
In light of the above, "a tentative and cautious enthusiasm" pretty well describes what I have for cryonics these days. I have always been fascinated by the liminal spaces in human experience, and cryonics is one all about such spaces, aiming as it does to act in that fuzzy twilight between life and death as we know them.
As noted in my prior post on this subject, I suspect that the biggest breakthroughs in suspension per se will probably occur as techniques like therapeutic hypothermia advance. After all, there is a solid basis for supposing that extremely low temperatures can protect the brain and permit recovery even after a person has been clinically dead and in circulatory arrest for quite a while; there are multiple documented accounts of this.
But, having done some more reading lately, I've learned that there have been some promising developments as a result of the efforts of people motivated to improve cryonic suspension techniques specifically. Most significantly, rabbit kidneys have actually been successfully vitrified, de-vitrified, and found to be functioning following this process. Of course this isn't proof positive that the same thing will be accomplished for the brain, but it's not a bad start.
Now, about whether trying to enable interrupted lives to continue in the future is ethically coherent: I would say, sure it is.
I have long believed that nobody ever suddenly becomes worthless as a function of being sufficiently aged, disabled, etc. I think people in comas are worthy of life. I think people who need ventilators and feeding tubes for decades on end are worthy of life. I think heart patients in a state of therapeutic hypothermia are worthy of life. I don't think there's anything noble about "pulling the plug" on someone or requesting that it be pulled on you. And so on.
Because of my convictions here, I feel it would be hypocritical and just plain unethical to sit here and assert that some people just need to give up and rot under a tree somewhere, because the world has already given them enough, or something. And I don't need to believe in perpetual-motion incoherence in order to assert that I think humans ought to be pursuing more and better ways to protect and preserve wanted lives, and that to the extent cryonics (or anything related to it) could help in this regard, I am all for it.
(I actually find a fair bit of discussion, even on subjects I'm really interested in, somewhat inaccessible due to copious use of widgets, so I am glad there is at least some non-widgety conversation to be had (or at least people who can deal with non-widgetiness on my end).)
So I'm going to attempt to explain my views as they (albeit by no means immovably) stand now, and hopefully this explanation makes sense.
Certainly, people have made some pretty wild claims about cryonics, and there's been a lot of over-hyping of its potential, and it's a subject around which one must be extremely careful (that is, presuming one wants to avoid falling into crackpot wishful-thinking traps).
However: if you can manage to scrape away enough of the subcultural detritus and personality artifacts that have glommed onto cryonics over the years, what you're left with is:
(a) an experiment in tissue preservation,
(b) the idea that future technology may someday be able to repair injury and illness not addressable by today's medicine, and
(c) a view of death as a process rather than a discrete event.
None of these things seem to me particularly irrational or farfetched in and of themselves.
Of course in reality you can't actually ignore the cultural connotations and fringe entanglements of something like cryonics. These things must be acknowledged and addressed if one wants to actually have a clear view of the subject, and that's part of what I am trying to do here.
E.g., I think the notion of cryonics has been harmed by assertions that it's a means to (even potentially) "buy immortality". Immortality, after all, is incoherent -- nobody knows how long they or anyone else is going to live, and it might end up being a pretty long time, but it sure as heck isn't going to be forever, any more than having a job gives you a shot at making Infinity Zillion Dollars.
(It's not that I'm pessimistic, it's that some things that work on paper turn to dust when you try and force-fit them into the real world, and I'm pretty darn sure "immortality" is one of these things, as it essentially requires that biological entities be transmuted into perpetual-motion machines.)
But when it comes to item (a) above, which amounts to the question of "might it be possible to vitrify and later de-vitrify (and reanimate) a mammal?", there you at least have something concrete you can test. Such an experiment would be perfectly at home in the realm of cryobiology (though cryonics and cryobiology are not one and the same). So as far as "intriguing fringe ideas" go, cryonics actually comes out ahead in my book, for the mere fact of actually having a significant testable component.
The issue I think most people (and I do count myself in this category here) have difficulty with when considering cryonics as a concept relates to its built-in speculative component, (b): that of the notion of eventually repairing presently-fatal pathology with as-yet-nonexistent technology.
It requires a certain sort of mindset to take the idea of future reparative technologies (not to mention a future culture where reanimating cryonics patients is considered a good and proper thing to do) seriously enough to actually consider signing up for cryonics a worthwhile act. And to the extent that this mindset is entangled with things even more marginal than cryonics (and note that by "marginal" I don't mean "unpopular with the intellectual elite/cultural mainstream" but rather "removed from concrete reality by greater than two or so degrees"), you can count me among its critics.
However, I see a significant difference between the "just dip the person in liquid nitrogen, and maybe someday the nanobots will be able to put him back together" scenario, and the "vitrify the person so as to minimize cellular damage and maybe someday we'll be able to devitrify her and take care of that pesky tumor" scenario. Clearly some scenarios associated with cryonics (and perhaps the majority up until fairly recently) have been ridiculous. But I don't think they're all ridiculous. The details matter.
As for (c), viewing death as a (potentially interruptible) process rather than an event, this is not unique to cryonics by any means. Wikipedia has this to say regarding death (emphasis mine):
The chief concern of medical science has been to postpone and avert death. Death in this context is now seen as less an event than a process: conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible. Where in the process a dividing line is drawn between life and death depends on factors beyond the presence or absence of vital signs. In general, clinical death is neither necessary nor sufficient for a determination of legal death. A patient with working heart and lungs determined to be brain dead can be pronounced legally dead without clinical death occurring.
So, in other words, "death" in real life is not the cartoon image of a person's ghost or soul abruptly and forever leaving the body; it's more complicated than that, and the process is more drawn out, and has even changed definitions multiple times throughout history. Hence the idea that if death is in fact a process, if we can find some way to halt the process before critical brain structures are destroyed forever, there might be some chance of bringing the person back.
A Tentative and Cautious Enthusiasm
In light of the above, "a tentative and cautious enthusiasm" pretty well describes what I have for cryonics these days. I have always been fascinated by the liminal spaces in human experience, and cryonics is one all about such spaces, aiming as it does to act in that fuzzy twilight between life and death as we know them.
As noted in my prior post on this subject, I suspect that the biggest breakthroughs in suspension per se will probably occur as techniques like therapeutic hypothermia advance. After all, there is a solid basis for supposing that extremely low temperatures can protect the brain and permit recovery even after a person has been clinically dead and in circulatory arrest for quite a while; there are multiple documented accounts of this.
But, having done some more reading lately, I've learned that there have been some promising developments as a result of the efforts of people motivated to improve cryonic suspension techniques specifically. Most significantly, rabbit kidneys have actually been successfully vitrified, de-vitrified, and found to be functioning following this process. Of course this isn't proof positive that the same thing will be accomplished for the brain, but it's not a bad start.
Now, about whether trying to enable interrupted lives to continue in the future is ethically coherent: I would say, sure it is.
I have long believed that nobody ever suddenly becomes worthless as a function of being sufficiently aged, disabled, etc. I think people in comas are worthy of life. I think people who need ventilators and feeding tubes for decades on end are worthy of life. I think heart patients in a state of therapeutic hypothermia are worthy of life. I don't think there's anything noble about "pulling the plug" on someone or requesting that it be pulled on you. And so on.
Because of my convictions here, I feel it would be hypocritical and just plain unethical to sit here and assert that some people just need to give up and rot under a tree somewhere, because the world has already given them enough, or something. And I don't need to believe in perpetual-motion incoherence in order to assert that I think humans ought to be pursuing more and better ways to protect and preserve wanted lives, and that to the extent cryonics (or anything related to it) could help in this regard, I am all for it.
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