X-Message-Number: 16118 Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 09:51:53 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: surviving as a copy Hi everyone! While supposing that we can make good copies of YOU or ME does raise these issues about identity, the first question I would ask is that of how far away we are from making such copies. Despite the sci fic on this issue, I'd say we are very far indeed. Why? Because even the job of making an intelligent machine is simpler that that of making a good enough copy of Mike Perry... a copy good enough not only to convince strangers that he is Mike Perry, but to convince Mike himself. It may even prove impossible: you, I, or Mike Perry may find it impossible to cooperate with the job of getting out enough specific information about ourselves to allow such a perfect copy. I'm not referring to anything deep or abstruse here, just the simple fact that we may not want EVERYTHING about ourselves to be known to anyone but ourselves. On a slightly deeper level, finding out such information and using it to make the copy doesn't look to me like something that any of us can do alone for ourselves: the job of reading out such information itself becomes more info about ourselves, until it becomes impossible because we end up chasing that information endlessly. SO, someone/something else may have to do that job, and thus our memories become accessible to others. If the others are robots that may first seem OK, but what keeps other HUMANS from reading the memories of those robots? Even supposing that we decide not to care if others learn literally everything about us (at a particular time), lots of practical problems still exist in making such a copy. AS of this time, we don't even have a complete understanding of how our different kinds of memories work (I'm not talking about computers or computer models here, but about real living human beings). We know already that many memories which seem quite real to us have been modified along the way, and the belief that witnesses will automatically give the same story of something they each have seen is wrong. Nobody's lying here, it's just that each brain is going off and making its own story unconsciously. This means that the memories of two copies may very well not coincide. I refer here not just to recent memories but to older ones too. Thus two copies will end up having DIFFERENT memories, again not just of recent events but older ones too. So in what sense are they copies of one another? Yes, this variation seems to occur only with SOME memories. Yet even if it occurs with only a few, it raises basic problems about just what a copy of Mike Perry is supposed to be or do. I actually think that these are ultimately solvable problems, and in some sense of the word "copy" (though not the sense used so easily by those proposing the various problems on Cryonet) we'd be able to work out how to copy someone. But as a way of surviving any time in the near future, or even a few centuries from now, it does not look to me like the best of strategies. I hope that everyone who enjoys thinking about such questions (yes, I do too) also gives some effort or money to research into finding some way to revive brains with no or minor loss of memory only: by vitrification or any other method which is PROVABLE in animals. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16118