Ahh, there is more to raising kids as cryonicists. You make it a part of almost daily discussions, when discussing politics, the news, science fiction plots, jokes that come up with friends– the possibilities of cryonics working, or just why to support it even if it did not work can come up in many areas.

I fully expect my children to learn how to lie, I also know that they have been honest about very large issues that are not generally acceptable in society. As parents I feel you have to teach ethics, and also be open to listening to what their problems are. As a guardian raising a child- one has to be strict and also be supportive–guiding and lenient.

I of course wrote 21st Century Kids, so cryonicist families could read it to their children and open up discussions about possibilities–and I’ve talked with families raising kids as cryonicists.

I’ve talked with adult cryonicists whose adult children are not cryonicists and I have always wondered how Marce taught her own children–how young were the youngest when she got involved in cryonics? How supportive was her husband? If you have a partner that thinks it is silly, or makes jokes about cryonics –then that undermines the respect you give cryonics. By saying the “respect you give” I in no way mean “belief in cryonics” (meaning 100% you have “faith” it will work, or say it is a “ticket to the future” etc.). Most parents I know who are cryonicists, as do I, tell their children that cryonics is no guarantee that it will work and that it is only a slight chance that it might.

I personally think it is a noble experiment to support and there are benefits to those living now such as from what we can learn now to help with organ transplantation. I present cryonics as a serious endeavor, but my children hear other things from some members within the family. I do not know yet what they will do as adults, but I do expect them to have honest communication with me, I know they will say things they think might hurt my feelings, or certainly that I’d not agree with. While raising them, we have had a history of inquiry, skepticism and debate about issues. I’ll respect their choices as adults, and till then I do what I can to raise them to be good people.

Anything I ask them to support, I try to back up with some kind of evidence–I raised them in the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, which is a secular humanist tradition and sometimes is called a community for atheists –really UU churches are compromised of people with many different faiths, they are welcoming and accepting communities. My children have a background of learning about religions and learning how to analyze their teachings, history and how they effect our society today. I also teach them to support social action, and we volunteer together as a family–I have no idea of they will continue to do those things as adults either (adult education in philosophy and theology or social action & volunteering).

I don’t know if you can “raise” cryonicists–but I’m certain some families will be successful in doing so. I’ve had some parents thank me for the discussions 21st Century Kids opened up, or said how their child really loved it. It is hard to be different period as a child, being able to explain why you are a cryonicist is as difficult as explaining your core philosophies or beliefs to another. Bringing up how those conversations can go, with kids, can help them have them.

And no, he won’t be forgotten, not as long as I live and others live who knew of his life, his work, and of his beautiful words. — Mike Darwin

Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.
I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books
much loved, and in children’s games I shall rise
from the dead to say the sun is shining.

-Osip Mandelshtam, last seen at the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp, 1938. There are varying accounts of how he met his end.

Of course, he seems to have been some type of religionist with various deplorable superstitious beliefs, so, according to you, apparently he got what he deserved – and your only regret is that the regime that murdered him is not still in business doing the same thing.

And his wife – mourning him all her life, subject to petty persecution from your vindictive heroes, hiding scraps of his poetry from the police – she had “poisonous” religious beliefs as well, so no doubt you’ll agree her suffering was entirely her own fault.

Undoubtedly Osip Mandelshtam ended up in a common grave. Perhaps he’ll end up forgotten. But even if he is, a thousand years won’t erase the truth of what he was, and what, alas, you are.

Alas, indeed.

Verbal intelligence allowed for radicallly increased capacity for deceit beyond that of the other mammals.

I also have to say that I don’t see the priest class as either parasitic or useless. Far from it, they perform a wide range of pro-survival functions for social groups.

The value of any “product” is in the eye of the beholder. If people are free to accept or reject their “product” on personal choice (on a competitive free market basis), then one can say that their “product” has value. If people are “strong-armed” into paying for their “product” whether they want it or not, based on coercion of a monopolistic entity, such demonstrates that their product really is not of value, since people are forced into it.

A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit

NEW YORK TIMES

By NATALIE ANGIER

December 23, 2008, on page D1 of the New York edition

When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.

Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.

Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.

Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.

In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.

In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.

“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”
The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.

Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.
Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.

“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”

Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.
Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.

Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”

One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.
We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?.

I also have to say that I don’t see the priest class as either parasitic or useless. Far from it, they perform a wide range of pro-survival functions for social groups. At a very basic level, they provide comfort, and some sort of “coherent” narrative and “explanation” for human suffering and death; something that I think is essential for both individuals and societies to retain their sanity, and their ability to function. Beyond providing some measure of surcease, the priest class is the principal reservoir and survival mechanism for culture, and for meta-level knowledge, such as exists in non-scientific and “non-rational” societies. As a recent example, we would have not had the Renaissance, were it not for a bunch of “parasitic” monks, who systematically encoded much of the remaining human knowledge base during the Dark Ages. It’s a pity that most men cannot see the Vatican Library, which is one of the most magnificent repositories of human knowledge now extant on the planet – and one where, sadly, Google is not at work digitizing the collection.

The priest class also served to rescue and mentor orphans, as well as socially ostracized, or otherwise undesirable youngsters, thus salvaging this very valuable resource for the society at large. It is also worth noting that almost all charitable activity in agricultural societies, such as caring for the sick, the poor and the orphaned, is a function of religious institutions. And more tellingly still, hunter-gatherers do indeed have priests and shamans, and they were/are given special “parasitic” status and exemption from the regular duties of the group. This has gone on for a long, long time, because it it is only necessary to look at the cave paintings in Lascaux, France which are 32,000 years old to know that a highly specialized priest class has existed since then. The Lascaux paintings are exquisite and incredibly subtle and complex; they are most definitely the work of professionals – people who did what they did more or less as a full time activity. The great art and intellectual activity of the Renaissance were also largely subsidized by the priest class, and by those who were beholden to, and empowered by them. And so it was, from the beginning of Western and Eastern civilization. It was only an eye blink ago that scientists became the new priest class. And interestingly, they are often accused of being parasites in exactly the way that priests historically have been. Indeed, the more removed scientists are from immediate practical applications, the more likely they are to be tarred with the label of parasite.

Today, people mistakenly conflate science with technology, and I think most believe that technology is a function of science. This is not the case at all. Technology existed far, far before science did, and it is only very recently that science became technologically productive. Before that time, technology progressed in a fashion virtually identical to biological evolution – from the creation of the first stone tools – all the way to the manufacture of complex looms. In fact, much and maybe most of technological advance today, is still a function of science-independent processes. Thus, historically, scientists have been “parasites,” and arguably still (mostly) are. — Mike Darwin

I would go a step further and claim that lying and deceit is probably the driver of the emergence of verbal intelligence in humans. Language ability seems to have emerged about the same time as agriculture and the emergence of a parasite class (priesthood). Nicholas Wade discusses this in his excellent book “Before the Dawn”. It was specifically agriculture that allowed for the existence of the parasite class as foragers (hunter-gatherers) had no room for such a parasite class. Everyone had to work even though the work was much less than subsistence agriculture.

I believe that verbal intelligence emerged as to make it easier for that parasite class to create all kinds of sophistry to trick others into supporting them. It is visual-spacial intelligence that is behind all scientific and technological progress.