X-Message-Number: 19874 Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 16:10:18 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: The (Venerable Old) Duplicates Issue Again This is a response to Dave Pizer's posting (#19865) in response to the posting of Francois (#19855). I think the duplicates issue is important in cryonics, though I realize some others disagree. (And there have been discussions aplenty on this.) Among other things, it affects our views on what would be an acceptable reanimation procedure, as well as what would be acceptable for "identity conservation" so reanimation could happen in the first place. And now we see (or again we see) that it ties in with our concepts of a future life and possible immortality, which are what motivate us to choose cryonics in the first place. Dave Pizer writes, >I do not believe that making copies of an individual and then destroying >the original can ever be called survival of the original, I believe that >holds true whether the copy is a carbon based brain similar to the >original brain, or a silicone based brain, of any other type of >duplicate. Only *the* original is the original. Dave is what I would call a tokenist, meaning that he sees a person, more or less, as a specific, material construct or "token." The atoms are what are important. Switch them out, and the result may resemble the original in every detail, but really is not the original. It means that "you" may not survive if your atoms are exchanged for other, similar atoms. I say "may not survive" rather than "cannot survive" because a switching out is going on all the time anyway, as your body metabolizes. Dave, I think, does not think people "die" repeatedly throughout their lives as their bodies metabolize. On the other hand, creating a duplicate of you while you sleep, and then destroying the original, would be another way of switching out the atoms, and this is what Dave would say is killing the original and substituting a different person, even if the second person is similar to the original in all respects and believes he/she is the same. This is one difficulty I see with the tokenist position (there are others). By way of contrast, I am a patternist who sees a person in terms of information content (the "pattern"). Preserve the pattern, and you preserve the person. So for me there would be no problem with the duplicate; as long as it's similar or a good enough copy, the original person survives, much as a book can be said to survive through a copy. And I realize there are difficulties with this position too. They can be met (my book has an extended discussion on this) and it is worth it, in my view. However, I think that both positions can be defended on logical grounds; there is no experimental test that will "prove" one is right or the other. It's a matter of which point of view you prefer. (In my book I discuss what I think are some good reasons to prefer the patternist position.) >Francois said: > >"The aim of most of CryoNet's subscribers is to achieve immortality. This, in >principle, can be done in many ways, some emotionally more satisfying than >others." > >I agree that achieving immortality is a great goal, but I don't think in >can be done is "many ways." It seems to me that there is only one way >*you* can become immortal, that is for *you* to become immortal. This may >sound funny at first It's a tautology. It begs the question of what is "you." >... "The preferred vision of immortality emerging from the many posted >messages seems to be purely biological in nature. ... >The resulting individuals look exactly as we do today, except that they >forever remain physically young." > >"This, however, presents a problem. ... suppose one of our >distant ancestors, a Homo Habilis for instance, became immortal three >million years ago. ... This immortal Habilis could then still be alive >today, but he would obviously be completely obsolete from the point of view >of intelligence, having been left far behind by our much better and keener >minds. Evolution would not have stopped just because he became immortal, and >it would have quickly transformed him into an actual living fossil." > >...There are ways for Habilis to cope with a superior race (us), in our >world and for us to cope with others in the future, they do not include >making a copy of the original and letting the original be destroyed, when >you do that, and if the original is destroyed, the original is no longer >immortal, he is now dead. It's not clear what constitutes "destroying" the original. Suppose, for instance, that the habilis undergoes a growth and development process, eventually reaching present-level human intelligence, maybe going beyond it, but in the process experiencing a lot of material changes. Is the original "destroyed"? >You don't have to become the machine to have access to machine >technology. Me being me, or you being you, is not how fast you think or >how much information you have stored in your cortex, it is the feeling of >awareness that you have and that I have. At first glance this may seem reasonable, but for me it doesn't bear up under scrutiny. For instance, if somehow two physical constructs, person-instantiations, were to think exactly alike and run in lock step, the patternist position would have it that they are one person not two. (Yes, it means you could be in two places at once, in this case without knowing it.) I think also that a growth process, going from a less to a more advanced being, is essential to a reasonable concept of immortality, thus to whether you can be said to survive, to be "you." Otherwise you finally encounter the "eternal return" in which the same mind states are revisited repeatedly, with no further progress. Eternal return, in my view, is not survival. You have to store a growing archive of personal information to avoid it. On a more immediate level, being stuck at one point in a developmental process would, I think, get insufferably boring or frustrating long before eternal return became an issue. > As long as that [the feeling of awareness] is preserved, it can access > lots of other stuff without having to become the other stuff. > >"Purely biological immortals will always suffer this fate." > >Why? Are we so dumb that we can't push a button and get an answer from a >machine? > Again, this ignores the problems of being stuck at a fixed level. Personally, I would have a strong urge to develop further, in open-ended fashion. In time, I would certainly not be H. sapiens, in any biological sense, no matter which atoms I was made of. I suppose I could attempt to keep "original" atoms from that being I once was, but I don't see much point in this, any more than I would take a skin sample now just to "save" it from normal metabolic replacement. If I am going to undergo material changes, and if nonbiological materials could serve my needs better than biologicals (in providing better memory and intelligence, say), then why not assimilate these new materials? I see no fundamental problem with that. It might be that these changes would be gradual; I suspect many would. However, suppose somehow I had a choice between a gradual change that would take many months and be inconvenient and expensive, and a sudden, cheap, and convenient change that would replace all or most of my atoms in one operation while I was asleep, with the original discarded. Other things equal, it would make sense to choose the latter course. Another possibility for the sudden change would be just to upload my information to some superior device, and take up from there, again discarding the original. Again, no fundamental problem, assuming the technology was up to it. >...I don't think we are doomed in the form we are. I disagree. But then, a little child is "doomed" as the being it is; it doesn't stay the same. It develops into something more than what it was, more than a child. In the future I hope not to keep my present form indefinitely, becoming a sort of pet or ward of machines more advanced than human, or even "controlling" them. (Who would really be controlling whom, to prevent disasters?) Instead I aim to become more than human myself. The sense of continuing identity I could still maintain by memories, and that's what I intend to do. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19874