Depressed Metabolism

The website Alternative Right has an interesting article on the declining pace of technological progress: The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking. This is a vaguely horrifying fact which is little appreciated…Certainly, people can be forgiven for thinking we live in a time of great progress, [...]

Excerpt from “Ben Best – A Case for Free Will AND Determinism” Determinism implies materialism — implies that consciousness is material. Cryonics is based on the premise that the preservation of the fine structure of the brain at low temperature will preserve the self — ie, that the self is entirely determined-by and contained-in the [...]

In the 2009-4 issue of Alcor’s Cryonics magazine I review the technical and practical feasibility of chemical preservation. One of the most interesting aspects of chemopreservation is that it could play a useful role in the cryopreservation of ischemic patients. There is accumulating evidence that vitrification agents cannot prevent ice formation in ischemic patients. This [...]

In an insightful and well organized article (PDF) Nick Trakakis asks the question whether the existence of evil presents a bigger problem for theologies that do not allow any room for free will. He offers a number of theodicies that are available to the “divine determinist” and concludes that although hard determinism introduces complications, these complications are [...]

The month of June marks World Environment Day and World Ocean Day, two environmentally conscious days whose main purpose is to spread awareness of environmental issues taking place in today’s world. However, a black cloud hangs over this year’s events as 42,000 gallons of oil a day (1) gushes into the Gulf of Mexico after [...]

About 35 people attended the Cryonics Oregon-sponsored debate on the subject of SENS. Chana de Wolf was mistress of ceremonies. A show of hands indicated that the great majority of those attending were signed-up cryonicists. There was a sizeable contingent of CI Members who drove down from Seattle for the event. One was Eron Hennessey [...]

On June 6th the next Cryonics Oregon meeting will coincide with a downtown Portland aging conference. As a result we have been successful in persuading Cryonics Institute President Ben Best and Alcor member and biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey to attend our meeting. The theme of the evening will be “Strategies for Life extension and Rejuvenation: [...]

Over the last couple of years, cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger has been a vocal critic of simplistic defenses of the idea of mind uploading as a survival strategy. He has worked out his reservations in detail in his latest book Youniverse: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy of Immortalism and Cryonics. In a recent CryoNet message he [...]

In spite of the empiricist trend of modern science, the quest for certainty, a product of the theological orientation of philosophy, still survives in the assertion that some general truths about the future must be known if scientific predictions are to be acceptable.  It is hard to see what would be gained by the knowledge [...]

In the March 2010 issue of Reason magazine Tim Cavanaugh writes about the rift between transhumanists who favor biological enhancement versus those who favor non-biological “mechanical” enhancement: These days transhumanists talk a lot about subcutaneous data ports, permanent immersion in virtual reality, even extending male life spans by removing the gonads. But they spend noticeably [...]

There are various competing strategies how to achieve meaningful life extension or rejuvenation, including , but not limited to, genetic manipulation, periodical elimination of damage, caloric restriction,  molecular nanotechnology and mind uploading. A useful review of these strategies has been published in the book The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans (2004) by [...]

“The crisis of empiricism, expressed in David Hume’s scepticism, was the product of a misinterpretation of knowledge and vanishes for a correct interpretation – such is the outcome of a philosophy grown from the soil of modern science. The rationalist has not only presented the world with a series of untenable systems of speculative philosophy [...]

Cryonics Institute President Ben Best talks about cryonics and how cryonics is related to rejuvenation in this one-hour long interview on “It’s Rainmaking Time!” Further Reading: Depressed Metabolism Interview with Ben Best

Peter Thiel, one of the few original minds in the life extension and accelerating-technological-change community, is featured in a short interview at Wired. Thiel seems to be aware of the limitations of extrapolation of trends: We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to [...]

Scientific consensus seems a reasonable concept. If a great number of individual scientists arrive at a similar opinion this is generally a sufficient reason to have confidence in those views. Skeptics about scientific consensus often use examples of scientific views that started out as a minority view to become the majority view later. Although these [...]

Singularity skeptic Mark Plus drew my attention to the following blog post. The author writes that: Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to [...]

Once a year I try to attend at least one biogerontology conference. Although I attend biogerontology conferences out of personal interest, and at my own expense, they are the most fruitful grounds for promoting cryonics I have found, and this is especially true of SENS conferences. I have missed none of the four SENS conferences [...]

There is a growing literature that discusses the technical aspects of revival of cryonics patients. The following list of the published literature was compiled by Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas and published as an appendix of their article on molecular nanotechnology in Cryonics Magazine 2008-4: Robert C.W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, Doubleday, NY, 1964 [...]

This past weekend Motel X, the Lisbon (Portugal) International Horror festival, had its third anniversary. It is one of the smaller international horror festivals around, but this year they managed to have both Stuart Gordon, director of several Lovecraft adaptions, and John Landis, director of the horror classic An American Werewolf in London, as special [...]

Today is the second anniversary of Depressed Metabolism. As of writing, this website has close to 200 feed subscribers. On an average day the website has 150 unique visitors, which is an encouraging increase in traffic since our last update. This is even more remarkable in light of the fact that new blog entries with [...]

In his classic book Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) Terence W. Hutchison  makes the case for economics as an empirical science. An interesting aspect about this book is the ease with which Terence W. Hutchison uses logical empiricist authors like Moritz Schlick, Rudulf Carnap, and Otto Neurath but also the “critical rationalist” [...]

Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, and one of the few futurist thinkers with a solid understanding of the philosophy of science, outlines his current views on the global warming controversy after being identified as a “denier” and “anti-science” by  some of his (transhumanist) critics: We skeptics (okay, “planetary traitors” if you prefer) actually [...]

Most contemporary philosophers and social scientists have little interest and understanding of logic or the physical sciences and  therefore have little to offer to those who want to understand the philosophical aspects of knowledge. The following five books have been written by thinkers who have a great respect for science and the importance of empirical [...]

From the preface of Michael Munowitz’s Principles of Chemistry: The wonder of the world is not its complexity, but its simplicity. Given enough color and canvas, anybody can make a mess; that, we do ourselves. More to admire is the artist who makes do with little, the artist whose art is to conceal an economy [...]

The June 2009 issue of Rejuvenation Research features an article by Cryonics Insitute President Ben Best about the involvement of nuclear DNA damage in the aging process: Abstract This paper presents evidence that damage to nuclear DNA (nDNA) is a direct cause of aging in addition to the effects of nDNA damage on cancer, apoptosis, [...]

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7 For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth.  – Sanskrit Proverb In the Beginning… Since the beginning of modern [...]

The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis)

Whenever there is a major economic event (a rapid decline of stock prices, a spike in the price of oil, high unemployment, etc.) the media can be counted on to feature a person who was predicting these events all along. This should not be surprising because there are so many professional economists and commentators who [...]

Hans Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy is among the most accessible and illuminating statements of logical empiricism. Although the book can be read as an introduction to philosophy, the central message of the work is that most of what constitutes philosophy is either (outdated) pre-scientific speculation or incoherent reasoning. One of the most powerful [...]

Source: ExtroBritannia Why the much anticipated medical breakthroughs of the early 21st century are failing to materialize Saturday 30th May 2009, 2pm-4pm. Room 403 (fourth floor), Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX. There’s no charge to attend, and everyone is welcome. Speaker Mike Darwin has 30 years experience in cutting edge medical research. Co-founder [...]