X-Message-Number: 18040
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 07:55:59 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: where are the duplicates?

Hi everyone!

A short answer (relatively) to Mike Perry on duplicates: no, they aren't.

First, the issue just doesn't connect closely with cryonics in any case.
Given that you come back, whether or not you come back with your brain
made anew isn't going to matter either to you or anyone else. The 
important point is that you came back.

If the same or similar technology can be used to make "copies" of you,
they won't be real copies in the first place. If we make lots of 
assumptions about the technology which does this, we just might produce
a creature that for an instant is a copy, but after that will cease to
be one. After all, they are either kept in a quite identical world to
the one you're living in ... not obviously a useful exercise to anyone,
or they are kept in a different world. And if they live in a different
world they will change in ways different from how you change, and quickly
cease to be identical.

For that matter, although it may be unfair in this discussion to raise
the point, lots of practical issues arise to make someone who is even
a copy for that instant. Making a whole adult person will take TIME,
and that time will do its best to make that whole adult person different
from the one from which he's copied. The time involved itself will make
him different. Again, I would not expect other people to simply shrug
and say that "they're making another Mike Perry, Ho hum". What you are
doing is basically one more form of reproduction, and runs into the same
problems that reproduction by any other means, even the most primitive,
will run into. Who's paying for it? Where's the future support of this
creature to come from?

After all, none of us qualifies as the only human being in existence.
Some people may well duplicate themselves, if they can afford it and
want to ... though they would not be doing cryonics in any sense if
they did so. This will be interesting to watch. But its relation to
cryonics has not more relation than cloning does.

		Best wishes and long long life to all,

			Thomas Donaldson

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