Report on Cryonics UK weekend!

The weekend kicked off with our AGM, at which our committee was re-elected. The only change to the Committee has been that Mark Willis has been elected Secretary, in place of Mark Walker.

A new Constitution was proposed, but to implement it at this meeting would give the membership insufficient notice and be unconstitutional, so notice will be given by our Secretary more than two weeks before the next meeting, such that it can be implemented at that time. At the last meeting, we created a large to-do list. At this meeting, we addressed whether these things had been done. Most of them had been done. The only thing not addressed as yet has been the ambulance's cosmetic make-over, which has been delayed due to inclement weather, and the reluctance of vehicle painting companies to take on such a one-off fiddly job. We expect to have this done before the next meeting, however.

Training was conducted over the course of both Saturday and Sunday, and included training regarding medications, the portable ice bath, the ambulance, the perfusion circuit, and the dry ice shipper.

Social meals out were enjoyed after training both days; Saturday this was at La Scala, and Sunday this was at Piccolino. Both are Italian restaurants in Sheffield.

If you missed out on this weekend, we look forward to seeing you at the next!

Details of such can be found by clicking the "Events" tab at www.cryonics-uk.com

Life-journalling the easy way - video glasses!

Many engage in life-journalling for the purposes of assisting with cryonics or other related technologies, with the thought that their memory may benefit from a jog regarding the experiences that shape (and for that matter demonstrate) their personality.

http://www.photojojo.com/store/awesomeness...n-video-glasses

I was recently introduced to the availability of this by Danila Medvedev.

These glasses (lenses interchangeable to be sunglasses; looks much less geeky that way) will surreptitiously record what you see and hear while they are activated. They can record around 5 hours, then they will need to download / change card.

I do not plan to use mine to record everything, but representational samples of my life as I go along, as well as functional things that I may wish to have recorded for more immediate practical purposes.

I will assume that I will not want to re-watch huge portions of my life 24/7 in any case, as that would make it take a year to watch a year's worth of experience, which is unlikely to be practical. Snippets thus seem more efficient. More like a documentary film of my life than an unwieldily large all-encompassing indiscriminate record.

There is obviously also the issue of future compatibility, but in this information age, I do not foresee humanity losing the ability to read a .avi video file. Also, data corruption is a possibility, but then data stored in any means can be damaged.

We (I say somewhat magnanimously as this is no specialty of mine) are getting pretty good at reconstructing damaged data from computer files, so this is not too bad a threat.

If absolutely nothing else, it's a fun project that takes up almost no extra time ;)

LEF-sponsored Cryonics Conference in Florida

What an event!

I went with the hope of making maybe a couple of useful new connections, and instead found a whole stack of incredibly valuable people with whom to coordinate efforts.

I was able to find very quickly and easily a strong connection with others present, in many cases mostly forgetting that I'd only just met them, and that was even before the "HT Meetings" - for those not present for these, each evening after the final events of the day there would be a large number of us congregating in and around the hot-tub by the pool, with many topics of discussion ranging from the banal to the profound, with many practical topics also being addressed in great depth (great conceptual depth, that is, being as it was just a hot-tub, not the ocean).

It is said: "No man is an island, except in the bathtub".

This humour (silly enough for me to like it, anyway) brings me to a more serious topic as well; it strikes me that one thing that has long held back our general field is periodic bouts of petty in-fighting between individuals and organisations.

Together we stand, divided we fall. "Let's stand together" was a great underlying feeling to the weekend, and it was truly brilliant to have so many people from so many backgrounds coming together for such an event, with a view to further solidifying things and working together towards our common goals.

As far as I am concerned the benefit of this conference has been immeasurable on a number of levels. My hat goes off to Cairn Idun for having the idea, and to Bill Faloon for having the foresight to fund it.

I greatly enjoyed the tour of SA, which was very useful to me, given my capacity of standby organiser in the UK. I salute the dedicated team there, especially Catherine' Baldwin's management.

Incidentally, any of you who are Immortality Institute members, or who would like to become such, can vote for me in the Directoral Election here, if you would like to further promote the efficacy of our endeavours.:

http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=37048

The Brain Drain Fallacy

I’ve been noticing a fair bit in the news lately about the “problem” of “Brain Drain”, that is to say the purported emigration of intelligence from a given country.

For example, there is the recent talk of the three Japanese scientists who were awarded Nobel Prizes for research conducted in US universities.

Today on the plane I noticed an English newspaper bemoaning the terrible problem of Brain Drain, with approximately 1/3 of the country’s academics saying that they will emigrate.

I daresay that other countries are complaining in a similar vein. Ignoring the obvious possibility that a country will receive as much expertise from abroad as it will send out into the wider world, I say this is still faulty reasoning to consider it a bad thing overall.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the age of the Global Village. We do not live in the time of Feudal arrangements, city states, or the like. Frankly, these days we can even relatively comfortably do business with a country with which we are at war.

The European Union is constantly shifting slowly yet inexorably towards being a “Superstate”, and many countries in the vicinity, some not even technically in Europe, are clambering to join it.

As I type this, I’m on a plane from Manchester to Philadelphia (where I will change and head for Florida) to attend an international conference geared towards - amongst other things - further improving the connections between cryonicists who might not already be in touch. I do not have a copy of the full attendance list yet, but I know of people coming from at least the US, the UK, Russia, Norway, the Netherlands, and Poland. I expect there to be a lot of other countries represented too, but these are the ones I’m aware of already just by word of mouth.

While many present will not be scientists, technical experts, or even actively involved already in the general furtherance of the field of cryonics, very many will be, and part of the purpose is to make more headway into sharing that information as freely and widely as possible throughout all those involved. This is effectively an “open source” approach to information, and it’s for the good of all involved, no matter whether one is more of a debtor or creditor when it comes to information sharing. The point is that the more people in general know about the field, the more the field will tend to advance for all of us, because people aren’t having to double up on research.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the real world, not Sid Meyer’s “Civilization”, wherein different nations must fight for intellectual supremacy over the others. It does not matter that research is conducted in one country or another; what matters is that it is conducted! Therefore people should feel entirely free to shift about geographically to wherever is best suited for this.

I find it bizarre that in this time of unprecedented Information and Communication Technology, many supposedly intelligent people still need to get out of the Dark Ages.

The world is getting smaller by the minute (don’t worry, no global warming jokes); why confine (and thus stifle) research and development?

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

I am not a man easily moved, yet the end of this movie moves me.

Oscar Schindler has been effectively buying Jews from concentration camps, to work in his factory. This started off as a business move, and then gradually shifts to being a humanitarian effort to save the lives of as many people as possible (at great personal risk). Thus he ploughs all his own money, and anything the "business" makes, into buying more workers, anything to keep them from the death camps. He runs out of money, and does his best to continue the illusion of a functional business and still save more lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPHvLtitxug

In the above clip, Schindler has done all the above, and must now flee, because the Allies have arrived to "liberate" the Jews who have, as far as the outside world is aware, been evily subjugated by Schindler to work in his factories for next to nothing. He faces arrest and trial as a war criminal, as that is the public guise he has been wearing in order to save many lives.

And yet he breaks down, as he realises with great regret that he could have done more.

I share this sentiment; one more life saved is precious. I hate death; it is my mortal enemy.

If a life can be saved of someone who does not wish to die, then I will do what I can to facilitate that. For this reason I feel compelled to do what I can to advance Immortalist ideas and technologies. For this reason I consider knowingly neglecting to take action a kind of passive murder, a terrible loss. And I really, really, hate missed opportunities.

For this reason, I do a lot.

But I must always do more.

Nominated for ImmInst Directoral Election.

I'm honoured to have been nominated for consideration in the Immortality Institute's 2010 Directoral Elections.

From the 9th of January to the 8th of February will then ensue a voting process open to the whole membership to decide which of the nominees will take a place on the Board of Directors.

I'm pleased to have been nominated, because I'd really like to work more for this most worthy organisation that does so much for the cause to which I devote my life.

The existing Director, who nominated me, is a like-minded fellow who seems to have the commitment, enthusiasm, and never-say-die attitude that this sort of endeavour really needs. I'd love to be a part of such a team.

If I should not be elected, I will of course continue doing what I'm doing in every area of Transhumanism in general (and Immortalism in particular) that I can.

"I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Immortalism
In our global present land"

If I am able to join the team on this occasion, I look forward to hastening the above!

Neurolinguistic Programming as a Transhumanist tool.

I developed an interest in neurolinguistic programming (Henceforth NLP) in the late 1990s, as it appealed to my ever-present desire to improve my mental attributes.

It came to my attention originally via a fellow I met by chance who introduced me to Ross Jeffries and a series of puerile yet pragmatic low-level NLP methodologies to secretly reorganise the minds of others to cause them to like you, dislike others, screw you, screw others over, etc. Simple stuff with limited applications, but it piqued my interest and got me looking into other wider areas of NLP.

Next along came Paul McKenna, and his series of alledgely hypnotic products. My own personal opinion is that there is no hypnosis involved in these at all, but rather cumulative transformational NLP. I started off with his "Supreme Self-Confidence" half-hour "trance" CD, and listened to it around once a day for the next few years, and have done so on and off since then. That particular product has since been rebranded "Change your life in seven days", by the way, but is the exact same recording, which now comes with a book on the side. I've since picked up a number of his other products, such as "Sleep like a log", "Motivation Power", and "I can make you thin"; the latter more out of curiosity than need. All are good, and I highly recommend them.

No, I had no issues with self-confidence (or motivation, for that matter), nor have I ever; but I am the kind of person who likes to improve everything as much as possible wherever possible. Despite not being stressed, I'm going to order his new "Control Stress" product. I like to do whatever I can to excel in any areas - if I already excel in an area, that's no reason to not want to excel further.

Anyway, the next stage in my journey was an NLP course to gain a Practitioner and Master Practitioner certificate. These were good, beneficial, useful, enjoyable, and altogether nothing I couldn't have got from reading relevant material and teaching myself. However, it's always nice to have papers as it lends credence to its use sometimes when it comes to the public eye. I always put it on my CV, for example.

I do, therefore, recommend doing such courses, but only if you are not concerned with outlaying large amounts of money for only slightly more benefit than you would get from teaching yourself.

Around the same period of time I acquired a lot of literature on the subject, including but not limited to books by Bandler and Grinder, Hall, and other such names, with the latter's "Sourcebook of Magic" being one of my favourites.

What I love so much about NLP is that it is a tool I can never lose, that can be used to fix almost any problem. I consider it a hugely important part of my Transhuman way of living, as in my opinion one of the biggest flaws of the human condition is the inability to become master of one's thoughts rather than slave to them. NLP allows the user to rise above this.

Consequently, after many years of rewiring my brain, it's very different now to how it used to be, and far more removed than the degree one might expect from general life experiences causing change. There are numerous emotions that I have simply "disconnected", that are now very difficult states for me to access; emotions that I consider counterproductive.

Some people say "But isn't that sad; those emotions are part of what makes us human".

Indeed, they are.

The difference is that I don't want to be human.

I want to rise above that.

NLP hastens that greatly!