X-Message-Number: 18011 Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 23:37:54 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Relevance Question, Identity Thomas Donaldson, #17996: >... 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? In general, informational issues bear on cryonics, because we are concerned with whether a person can be reanimated from frozen remains, and what would constitute successful reanimation. It is not hard to show how this brings up the problem of duplicates. Suppose, for instance, that you found a lot of damaged tissue in the remains but could still infer "what ought to be there." In your repair work, you replace some of the old tissue with similar but new tissue, made of different atoms. (Indeed some of the old tissue may be missing anyway, so long as the necessary information is still inferable.) Do you then get the "same person" after a presumably successful reanimation? You can raise the same question for the case that you replace all the original tissue. Is it still the same person? Some of us like myself, who favor the "information paradigm" or IP, would conclude that it is. But this would allow the production of duplicates, and we must confront the problem of duplicates in its various forms. Can we still uphold an information-based notion of identity? One case of duplicates, a bit farfeched but possible in principle, would have several person-constructs (I would call them instantiations) awake and functioning just alike only in different locations. (I could imagine this being done in the future with intercommunicating nanites who are able to achieve the necessary, coordinated functioning in the different constructs.) This would mean, for instance, that each is perceiving and feeling just alike and is unaware of any special conditions that would distinguish him or her from any of the others. Now, suppose these constructs are all put into suspended animation, still all identical. If I make another copy and wake it up, then by the IP I should have reanimated one of these--but which one? One way to resolve the question is to regard them all, when they were awake and functioning alike, as comprising one person only, though multiply instantiated. So we only have one person to be concerned with and can say, without paradox, that that person is reanimated. Objections can be raised, of course, but this position can be defended, as I do in my book. >As for identity, ... that is a matter of definition. I agree. Endless best to all, Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18011