X-Message-Number: 17996 Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 07:46:17 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #17988 - #17993 Hi everyone! As you can probably guess, there is no Thanksgiving Holiday in Australia. And since my wife is an Australian (also a cryonicist) she doesn't feel any need to do the cooking involved in producing one local to 12 Busby St, where we live. (Yes, you can buy turkeys here, plus all the makings of stuffing and everything else. It just isn't a holiday). Even so, I wish all the American cryonicists a Happy Thanksgiving. And hope that Alcor doesn't shut down for ANY holiday EVER. As for other questions: would Mike Perry and the others taking up this topic tell me why the notion of a person being in several places but still the same person, at the same time, bears on cryonics? I do not object to philosophy, not at all, nor to physics (which has now gone into some wild waters). But not all philosophy or physics bears on cryonics. Maybe Mike can think of some close connections but I cannot do so offhand. As for identity, if we look at it in a mathematically literal sense then what is identical will change with our definitions, not just of the thing but of identity itself. Consider functions on measure spaces like the real line; what we consider to be a single function is often not the single function but the class of functions which are identical to it on all but a set of measure 0. Since the set of measure 0 ranges all over, we have far more than a countable number of functions all of which are considered identical. Don't ask me if they are REALLY identical: that is a matter of definition. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17996