X-Message-Number: 21091 Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 00:34:21 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Identity Question, Moral Issues Francois writes: >The question I really want to ask >now is this: does it matter which one of these vitrified bodies is selected >to undergo the reanimation process? Whichever one you choose, the person who >wakes up will be, to others and to itself, the one that originally died and >was vitrified. It will have complete and true continuity of self with the >person who originally died. It will in fact BE that person. Or are there >arguments that can negate that statement? The answer you get will depend on whom you ask, and what that person considers important. For me, one body is as good as another. If you revive just one, you have the "same" person waking up again; you can regard the other vitrified bodies as just backup information. If you revive several, then they will start to live separate lives, so you will have caused one individual to fission into more than one. Some interesting, tricky moral issues have been raised over such ideas, however--assuming, as usual, that future capabilities allow the choices that are relevant. (Most recently this was done by James Swayze, but also earlier by Lee Corbin, possibly others.) If you have one vitrified body only, that is similar to a person in a coma. Barring some extraordinary circumstance, the person in question would stand in need of rescue much as today we would consider a person who has just lost consciousness to be in need of assistance. But, being the pattern survivalist I am, I would have to treat the vitrified body as just one possible storage medium of information about the person, and consider other possibilities on an equal footing. If, say, the original, vitrified body underwent a kind of fossilization in which the atoms were all replaced by other atoms, not necessarily of the same elements, but capturing all the original information, this would still be a vitrified person as far as I am concerned. The same moral principle would apply; that is, you would have to treat this as a person in need of assistance. This must follow even if the information was expressed in a different medium entirely, such as a very large text file. So, do you really have a moral obligation to wake the person and give them runtime? And what if there are several copies of the information in existence, must you grant runtime to each copy? Finally, assuming that copies can be manufactured, are you obligated further to manufacture as many as you can to multiply the runtime as far as possible? My feeling is that there is no easy rule that would fit all circumstances. If you *fail* to give runtime when you can, that is like murder, but if you go too much in the opposite direction, you could create unimaginable suffering through overcrowding or otherwise cause great harm. So, perhaps the happy medium is that you should take very seriously the idea of giving runtime to as many copies as possible, even generating more copies for the purpose, but *only* as a very longterm project. In other words, you could delay each reanimation (after the first, let's say) for many centuries or whatever seemed appropriate in a hopefully immortal future. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21091