VII. DE-ANIMATION/RE-ANIMATION
1. Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death, (co-written with Eric Gullichsen)
2. Hybernating Andy
VII.1. Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death
CO-WRITTEN WITH ERIC GULLICHSEN
Death is the ultimate negative patient health outcome.
—William L Roper, Director, Health Care Financing Administration (which administers Medicare)
Most human beings face death with an "attitude" of helplessness, either resigned or fearful. Neither of these submissive, uninformed "angles of approach" to the most crucial event of one's life can be ennobling.
Today, there are many practical options and methods available for navigating the dying process. Passivity, failure to learn about them, might be the ultimate irretrievable blunder. Pascal's famous no-lose wager about the existence of God translates into modern life as a no-risk gamble on the prowess of technology.
For millennia the fear of death has depreciated individual confidence and increased dependence on authority.
True, the loyal members of a familial or racial gene pool can take pride in the successes and survival tenacity of their kinship. For example, around the year 1600, at the height of the obedient, feudal stage, the Chinese philosopher, Li Zhi, wrote a revealing essay outlining “the five ways to die”:
1. death for a worthy cause,
2. death in battle,
3. death as a martyr,
4. death as a loyal minister, unjustly attacked,
5. premature death after finishing some good piece of work.
Thus we see that the aim of the “good (G. Gordon Liddy) life” was one of submission to authority. If your life was dedicated to serving the gene pool, then, logically, your death is the final, crowning sacrifice of your individuality.
But for the humanist who believes in the sanctity of the individual, these traditional prospects are less than exalted. Let’s be honest here. How can you be proud of your past achievements, walk tall in the present, or zap enthusiastically into the future if, awaiting you implacably around some future comer, is Old Mr. D, the Grim Reaper?
What a PR job the wordmakers did to build this death concept into a primetime horror show! The Grave. Mortification. Extinction. Breakdown. Catastrophe. Doom. Finish. Fatality. Malignancy. Necrology. Obituary. The End.
Note the calculated negativity. To die is to croak, to give up the ghost, to bite the dust, to kick the bucket, to perish. To become inanimate, lifeless, defunct, extinct, moribund, cadaverous, necrotic. A corpse, a stiff, a cadaver, a relic, food for worms, a corpus delicti, a carcass. What a miserable ending to the game of life!
Note the calculated negativity. To die is to croak, to give up the ghost, to bite the dust, to kick the bucket, to perish. To become inanimate, lifeless, defunct, extinct, moribund, cadaverous, necrotic. A corpse, a stiff, a cadaver, a relic, food for worms, a corpus delicti, a carcass. What a miserable ending to the game of life!
In the past, the reflexive genetic duty of top management (those in social control of the various gene pools) has been to make humans feel weak, helpless, and dependent in the face of death. The good of the race or nation was ensured at the cost of the sacrifice of the individual. Obedience and submission were rewarded on a time-payment plan. For his/her devotion, the individual was promised immortality in the postmortem hive center variously known as heaven, paradise, or the Kingdom of the lord.
FEAR OF DEATH WAS AN EVOLUTIONARY NECESSITY IN THE PAST
In the past, the reflexive genetic duty of top management (those in social control of the various gene pools) has been to make humans feel weak, helpless, and dependent in the face of death. The good of the race or nation was ensured at the cost of the sacrifice of the individual.
Obedience and submission were rewarded on a time-payment plan. For his/her devotion, the individual was promised immortality in the postmortem hive center variously known as heaven, paradise, or the Kingdom of the Lord. In order to maintain the attitude of dedication, the gene-pool managers had to control the “dying reflexes,” orchestrate the trigger-stimuli that activate the “death circuits” of the brain. This was accomplished through rituals that imprint dependence and docility when the “dying alarm bells” go off in the brain.
Perhaps we can better understand this imprinting mechanism by considering another set of “rituals,” those by which human hives manage the conception-reproduction reflexes, the fertilization rituals. A discussion of these is less likely to alarm you.
The mechanisms of control imposed by the operation of social machinery are similar in the two cases. Let us “step outside the system” for a moment, to see vividly what is ordinarily invisible because it is so entrenched in our expectation.
At adolescence each kinship group provides morals, rules, taboos, ethical prescriptions to guide the all-important sperm-egg situation.
Management by the individual of the horny DNA machinery is always a threat to hive inbreeding. Dress, grooming, dating, courtship, contraception, abortion patterns are fanatically conventionalized in tribal and feudal societies. Personal innovation is sternly condemned and ostracized. Industrial democracies vary in the sexual freedom allowed individuals, but in totalitarian states, China and Iran, for example, rigid prudish morality controls the mating reflexes and governs boy-girl relations. Under the Chinese dictator Mao, “romance” was forbidden because it weakened dedication to the state, i.e., the local gene pool. If teenagers pilot and select their own mating, then they will be more likely to fertilize outside the hive, more likely to insist on directing their own lives, and, worst of all, less likely to rear their offspring with blind gene-pool loyalty.
Even more rigid social-imprinting rituals guard the “dying reflexes.” Hive control of “death” responses is taken for granted in all precybernetic cultures.
In the past, this conservative degradation of individuality was an evolutionary virtue. During epochs of species stability, when the tribal, feudal, and industrial technologies were being mastered and fine-tuned, wisdom was centered in the gene pool, stored in the collective linguistic consciousness, the racial data base of the hive.
Since individual life was short, brutish, aimless, what a singular learned was nearly irrelevant The world was changing so slowly that knowledge could be embodied only in the breed-culture. Lacking technologies for the personal mastery of transmission and storage of information, the individual was simply too slow and too small to matter. Loyalty to the racial collective was the virtue. Creativity, premature individuation was anti-evolutionary; a weirdo, mutant distraction. Only village idiots would try to commit independent, chaotic, unauthorized thought.
In the feudal and industrial eras, management used the fear of death to motivate and control individuals. Today, politicians use the death-dealing military, the police, and capital punishment to protect the social order. Organized religion maintains its power and wealth by orchestrating and exaggerating the fear of death.
ANDY FRITH
Among the many things that the pope, the ayatollah, and fundamentalist Protestants agree on is that confident understanding and self-directed mastery of the dying process is the last thing to be allowed to the individual. The very notion of cybernetic postbiologic intelligence or consumer immortality options is taboo, sinful, for formerly valid reasons of gene-pool protection.
Religions have cleverly monopolized the rituals of dying to increase control over the superstitious. Throughout history the priests and mullahs and medical experts have swarmed around the expiring human like black vultures. Death belonged to them.
As we grew up in the 20th Century, we were systematically programmed about how to die. Hospitals are staffed with priests/ministers/rabbis ready to perform the “last rites.” Every army unit has its Catholic chaplain to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction (what a phrase, really!) to the expiring soldier. The ayatollah, chief mullah of the Islamic death cult, sends his teen-aged soldiers into the Iraq minefields with dog-tags guaranteeing immediate transfer to the Allah’s destination resort, Koranic Heaven. A terrible auto crash? Call the medics! Call the priest! Call the reverend!
In the industrial society, everything becomes part of big business. Dying involves Blue Cross, Medicare, health-care delivery systems, the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), terminal patient wards. Undertakers. Cemeteries. The funeral rituals. The monopolies of religion and the assembly lines of top management control the dying and the dead even more efficiently than the living.
For millennia the fear of death has depreciated individual confidence and increased dependence on authority.
We recall that knowledge and selective choice about such gene-pool issues as conception, test-tube fertilization, pregnancy, abortion are dangerous enough to the church fathers.
But suicide, right-to-die concepts, euthanasia, life-extension, out-of-body experiences, occult experimentation, astral-travel scenarios, death/rebirth reports, extraterrestrial speculation, cryogenics, sperm banks, egg banks, DNA banks, artificial-intelligence technology— anything that encourages the individual to engage in personal speculation and experimentation with immortality—is anathema to the orthodox seed-shepherds of the feudal and industrial ages.
The cybernetic age we are entering could mark the beginning of a period of enlightened and intelligent individualism, a time unique in history when technology is available to individuals to support a huge diversity of personalized lifestyles and cultures, a world of diverse, interacting, small social groups whose initial-founding membership number is one.
Why? Because if the flock doesn’t fear death, then the grip of religious and political management is broken. The power of the gene pool is threatened. And when control loosens in the gene pool, dangerous genetic innovations and mutational visions tend to emerge.
THE AGE OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-CONTROL
The cybernetic age we are entering could mart the beginning of a period of enlightened and intelligent individualism, a time unique in history when technology is available to individuals to support a huge diversity of personalized lifestyles and cultures, a world of diverse, interacting, small social groups whose initial-founding membership number is one.
The exploding technology of light-speed and multimedia communication lays a delicious feast of knowledge and personal choice within our easy grasp. Under such conditions, the operating wisdom and control naturally passes from aeons-old power of gene pools, and locates in the rapidly self-modifying brains of individuals capable of dealing with an ever-accelerating rate of change.
Aided by customized, personally programmed, quantum-linguistic appliances, individuals can choose their own social and genetic future, and perhaps choose not to “die.”
THE WAVE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
Current theories of genetics suggest that evolution, like everything else in the universe, comes in waves.
ANDY FRITH
At times of “punctuated evolution,” collective metamorphoses, when many things are mutating at the same time, the ten commandments of the “old ones” become ten suggestions. At such times of rapid innovation and collective mutation, conservative hive dogma can be dangerous, suicidal. Individual experimentation and exploration, the thoughtful methodical scientific challenging of taboos, becomes the key to the survival of the gene school.
As we enter the cybernetic age, we arrive at a new wisdom that broadens our definition of personal immortality and gene-pool survival: the postbiologic options of the information species. A fascinating set of gourmet consumer choices suddenly appear on the pop-up menu of The Evolutionary Cafe.
It is beginning to look as though, in the information society, individual human beings can script, produce, direct their own hybernation and re-animation. Dying becomes a “team sport.”
Here we face mutation shock in its most panicky form. As we have done in understanding earlier mutations, the first step is to develop a new language. We should not impose the values or vocabulary of the past species on the new cybernetic culture.
Would you let the buzzwords of a preliterate, paleolithic cult control your life? Will you let the superstitions of a tribal-village culture (now represented by the pope and the ayatollah) shuffle you off the scene? Will you let the mechanical, planned-obsolescence tactics of the factory, Blue Cross culture manage your existence?
RE-CREATIONAL DYING
Let us have no more pious, wimpy talk about death. The time has come to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about personal responsibility for managing the dying process. For starters, let’s demystify dying and develop alternative metaphors for consciousness leaving the body. Let us speculate good-naturedly about postbiologic options. Let’s be bold about opening up a broad spectrum of Club-Med postbiologic possibilities. Let us explore the option of recreational dying.
It is beginning to look as though, in the information society, individual human beings can script, produce, direct their own hybernation and re-animation. Dying becomes a "team sport.”
We recognize that the dying process, which for millennia has been blanketed by taboo and primitive superstition, has suddenly become accessible to human intelligence.
ANDY FRITH
For starters, let’s replace the word death with the more neutral, precise, scientific term: metabolic coma. And then let’s go on to suggest that this temporary state of coma might be replaced by auto-metamorphosis, a self-controlled change in bodily form, where the individual chooses to change his or her vehicle of existence without loss of consciousness.
Then, let’s distinguish between involuntary and voluntary metabolic coma. Reversible and irreversible dying.
Let’s explore those fascinating borderlands—the periods between body dying and neurological dying and DNA dying in terms of the knowledge-information processing involved.
Let’s collect some data about that even more intriguing zone now beginning to be researched in the cross-disciplinary field of scientific study known as artificial life. What knowledge-information-processing capacities can be preserved after both body death and brain cessation? What natural and artificial systems, from the growth of mineral structures to the self-reproduction of formal mathematical automata, are promising alternative candidates to biology for the support of life?
And then let us perform the ultimate act of human intelligence. Let’s venture with calm, open-minded tolerance and scientific rigor into that perennially mysterious terra incognita and ask the final question: What knowledge-information-processing possibilities can remain after the cessation of all bio-logical life: somatic, neurological, and genetic?
How can human consciousness be supported in digital, light-wave, zero-one wafers outside the moist envelope of graceful, attractive, pleasure-filled meat we now inhabit? How can the organic, carbon-constructed caterpillar become the silicon butterfly?
POSTBIOLOGICAL RE-CREATIONAL AWARENESS
We recognize that the dying process, which for millennia has been blanketed by taboo and primitive superstition, has suddenly become accessible to human intelligence.
Here we experience the sudden insights that we need not “go quietly” and passively into the dark night or the neon-lit, Muzak-enhanced Disney-Heaven of the Jesus Corporation. We realize that the concept of involuntary, irreversible metabolic coma known as “death” is a lethal, feudal superstition, a cruel marketing tactic of industrial society. We understand that one can discover dozens of active, creative alternatives to going belly-up clutching the company logo of the Christian Cross, Blue Cross, or Crescent Cross, or the eligibility cards of the Veterans Administration.
Recognition is always the beginning of the possibility for change. Once we comprehend that “death” can be defined as a problem of knowledge-information memory processing, solutions to this age-long “problem” can emerge. We realize that the intelligent thing to do is to try to keep one’s knowledge-processing capacities around as long as possible. In bodily form. In neural form. In DNA form. In the silicon circuitry and magnetic storage media of today’s computers. In molecular form, through the atom-stacking of nanotechnology in tomorrow’s computers. In cryogenic form. In the form of stored data, legend, myth. In the form of offspring who are cybernetically trained to use postbiologic intelligence. In the form of postbiological gene pools, info-pools, advanced viral forms resident in world computer networks and cyberspace matrices of the sort described in the “sprawl novels” of William Gibson.
The second step in attaining post-biologic, re-creational awareness is to shill from the passive to the active mode. Industrial-age humans were trained to await docilely the onset of termination, and then to turn over their body for disposal to the priests and the factory (hospital) technicians.
Our species is now developing the cybernetic information skills and the activists’ confidence to plan ahead, to make one’s will and testament prevail. The smart thing to do is to see dying as a change in the implementation of information processing: to orchestrate it, manage it, anticipate and exercise the many available options.
We consider here twenty-three distinct methods of avoiding a submissive or fearful dying.
POSTBIOLOGICAL RE-CREATIONAL PROGRAMMING INTELLIGENCE
In previous writings the authors have defined eight stages of intelligence: biological, emotional, mental-symbolic, social, aesthetic, neurological-cybernetic, genetic, atomic-nanotech. At each of these stages there is an input recognition stage, followed by a programming-reprogramming stage, and an output communication stage.
In order to reprogram, we must activate the circuits in the brain which mediate that particular dimension of intelligence. Once this circuit is “turned on,” we can re-imprint or reprogram.
The time has come to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about personal responsibility for managing the dying process. For starters, let’s demystify dying and develop alternative metaphors for consciousness leaving the body. Let us speculate good-naturedly about postbiologic options. Let’s be bold about opening up a broad spectrum of Club-Med postbiologic possibilities. Let us explore the option of re-creational dying.
We realize that the intelligent thing to do is to try to keep one’s knowledge-processing capacities around as Ions as possible. In bodily form. In neural form. In DNA form. In the silicon circuitry and magnetic storage media of today’s computers. In molecular form, through the atom-stacking of nanotechnology in tomorrow’s computers. In cryogenic form. In the form of stored data, legend, myth. In the form of offspring who are cybernetically trained to use postbiologic intelligence. In the form of postbiological gene pools, info-pools, advanced viral forms resident in world computer networks and cyberspace matrices of the sort described in the "sprawl novels” of William Gibson.
Cognitive neurology suggests that the most direct way to reprogram emotional responses is to reactivate the emotional stage and reprogram, replace fear with laughter. To reprogram sexual responses, it is logical to reactivate and re-experience the original teenage imprints and to re-imprint new erotic stimuli and new sexual responses.
The circuits of the brain which mediate the “dying” process are routinely experienced during “near-death” crises. For centuries people have reported: “My entire life flashed before my eyes as I sank into the water.”
This “near-death, out-of-the-body” experience can be turned on via certain anaesthetic drugs. Ketamine, for example. Or by learning enough about the effects of out-of-the-body drugs so that one can use hypnotic techniques to activate the desired circuits without using external chemical stimuli.
We see immediately that the rituals intuitively developed by religious groups are designed to induce hypnotic-trance states related to “dying.” The child growing up in a Catholic culture is deeply imprinted (programmed) by funeral rites. The arrival of the solemn priest to administer extreme unction becomes access codes for the pre-mortem state. Other cultures have different rituals for activating and then controlling (programming) the death circuits of the brain. Until recently, very few have permitted personal control or customized consumer choice.
Almost every animal species manifests “dying reflexes.” Some animals leave the herd to die alone. Others stand with legs apart, stolidly postponing the last moment Some species eject the dying organism from the social group.
To gain navigational control of one’s dying processes, three steps suggest themselves:
1. Activate the death reflexes imprinted by your culture, experience them. Imagine dressing up like a priest, rabbi, minister, and mimic their solemn, hypnotic rituals. Visualize. Recite the prayers for the dying. Do these things in the virtual reality of your mind. Officiate at your own platonic funeral.
2. Trace their origins; then
5. Reprogram, install your own pre-mortem plan for immortality.
BRUMMBAER
The aim is to develop a scientific model of the chain of cybernetic (knowledge-information) processes that occur as one approaches this metamorphic stage— and to intentionally develop options for taking active responsibility for these events.
ACHIEVING IMMORTALITY
Since the dawn of human history, philosophers and theologians have speculated about immortality. Uneasy, aging kings have commanded methods for extending the life span.
A most dramatic example of this age-long impulse is ancient Egypt, which produced mummification, the pyramids, and manuals like the Book of the Dying.
We do not endorse any particular technique of achieving immortality. Our aim is to review all options and encourage creative thinking about new possibilities.
The Tibetan Book of the Dying presents a masterful (Buddhist) model of post-mortem stages and techniques for guiding the student to a state of immortality which is neurologically “real” and suggests scientific techniques for reversing the dying process.
The new field of molecular engineering is producing techniques within the framework of current consensus Western science to implement auto-metamorphosis. The aim of the game is to defeat death—to give the individual mastery of this, the final stupidity.
We do not endorse any particular technique of achieving immortality. Our aim is to review all options and encourage creative thinking about new possibilities.
A PRELIMINARY LIST OF RE-CREATIONAL OPTIONS
(TO REPLACE INVOLUNTARY IRREVERSIBLE METABOLIC COMA)
PSYCHOLOGICAL-BEHAVIORAL TRAINING TECHNIQUES
The techniques in this category do not assist in attaining personal immortality per se, but are useful in acquiring the experience of “experimental dying,” reversible-voluntary exploration of the territory between body coma and brain death, sometimes called out-of-body experiences; or near-dying experiences. Others have termed these experiences astral travel or reincarnation memories.
It seems likely that, by the year 2000, ceremonial, dignified celebration of one’s own transition will be considered a basic human ritual.
1. Meditation, hypnosis.
The classic yogic routes to exploration of nonordinary states of consciousness, well-known to be labor and time-intensive. The aim is to attain an out-of-body experience.
2. Psychedelic drug experiences.
The use of re-creational (psychedelic) drugs to access information and operational programs stored in the brain of the individual. In normal states of consciousness, these states are not available for voluntary access.
3. Re-creational anaesthetics.
Carefully designed for experimental out-of-body experiences. John Lilly has written extensively about his experiences with small dosages of anaesthetics such as Ketamine. It is possible that the out-of-body subjective effects of such substances are interpretations of proprioceptive disruption. Nevertheless, information is available through these investigative routes.
4. Sensory deprivation.
Primarily accomplished in isolation-tank immersions, a method most comprehensively investigated by John Lilly.
5. Reprogramming exercises.
Suspending and replacing socially imprinted “death” imprints.
6. Development of new rituals to guide the post-body transition.
Our cultural taboos have prohibited the development of much detailed work in this area, but some important research has been done by E. J. Gold and others.
7. Pre-incarnation exercises.
Using the preferred altered-state method (drugs, hypnosis, shamanic trance, voodoo ritual, born-again frenzies) to create future scripts for oneself.
8. Voluntary dying.
This procedure is called “suicide,” i.e., “self-murder,” by officials who wish to control the mortem process. Until recently, self-induced death has been considered a cowardly or insane attempt to interfere with the natural order. Anyone who wished to manage and direct their own dying was condemned by law and custom.
In a pagan or nature-attuned tribal culture, there is a common-sense genetic wisdom implied in this passive acceptance of one’s termination. The brain continually monitors the vital functions of the body, and as the body starts failing, terminal programs take over. The brain quietly shuts down the body and during the few minutes between body death and neurological death, the brain’s hundred billion neurons probably enjoy an astonishing “timeless” review of all and everything.
In the late 20th Century, however, mechanical medical science started “interfering” quite dramatically with the “natural” order. Tubes and machines are now used to keep patients “alive” long after the cessation of consciousness. A stroke victim who twenty years ago might have died in an hour can now be revived, only to spend years in machine-induced coma.
Most people are shocked and outraged by mechanical-medical methods that strip dignity and human consciousness from the terminal-coma patient The American Medical Association has supported the right of the family to remove medical treatment from terminally ill comatose patients.
Then there is the problem of intractable pain suffered by patients terminally ill from “artificial” diseases caused by industrial pollution like cancer, which cause agonizing pain. The brain housed in the body of a person living in the industrial low-rent, tacky culture of the late 20th Century is not programmed to handle these new diseases. The brain is capable of producing endorphin pain-killers naturally. The brain is beautifully geared to slowly, gracefully turn out the lights for humans— as they do for other animals. Our sisters and brothers, the other pack animals like wolves and dogs and cats (for example), manage to die in dignity without screaming to veterinarians for sedation or priests for extreme unction.
But the factory-hospital environment, run efficiently by factory managers (doctors and nurses), is a very strange environment for any normal hundred-billion-neuron brain. Hospitalized patients whose brains are imprinted to perform as factory units when terminally ill and in great pain passionately beg to be put out of their hopeless misery.
Fundamentalist religious groups and neofeudal officials oppose any “pro-choice” initiative that allows individuals to manage their own lives. These groups also are actively opposed to “euthanasia.”
[By 1990 a growing movement had developed in California to allow terminally ill patients to arrange for their own dying: Americans Against Human Suffering (Freedom of Choice for Physician Aid-in-Dying). In Holland, "euthanasia on request" is made available after a prudent, suitable period of review. Since 1992 Michigan doctor Jack Kevorkian has repeatedly tested the law by helping his terminally ill patients exercise their right to choose the time and manner of their death.]
It seems likely that, by the year 2000, ceremonial, dignified celebration of one’s own transition will be considered a basic human ritual.
9. Pre-mortem hybernation.
In the last section we have considered active management of one’s own dying: voluntary irreversible metabolic coma. This planful procedure takes on a different meaning when the person does not “die,” but slides into cryonic or brain-bank hybernation. This option is called “pre-mortem suspension.” It has been ruled legal in California, in a case brought by the Alcor Foundation.