X-Message-Number: 21306 Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 00:57:55 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Survival Through Duplicates Dave Pizer makes a long reply to my recent posting concerning whether survival of a person could occur in a duplicated body (something which, as has been remarked, could be an important issue in cryonic resuscitation and later survival). I say yes, he says no. I'll try to limit my response here to a few salient points. Pizer said: "If the body, which contains the brain, is not the person, then you are describing some sort of nonmaterial dualism. At least, you are claiming the mind is nonphysical. If it is nonphysical, it does not exist in this universe in which everything is physical." I disagree that "everything is physical". What about pi? Or other mathematical concepts? What about a symphony? These things need some involvement with matter, it is true, to be observed and experienced, but they are something apart and distinct from any specific material thing. I also bring up the example of a book, which I claim may be said to survive in its copies yet is something apart from them. And yes, I do feel the mind is nonphysical, and so is the person. (Interestingly, in my book I distinguish between the mind and the person, but that is something of a technicality.) I said before, "a 'book you write' is not purely and simply the copy of the book you put on your shelf, after it finally comes back from the publisher." Pizer said in reply, "Of course it is. It is a copy, not to be confused with the original." In response to this, I submit that a book could be written without there being an "original." If, for instance, you imagine the text is encoded, as you type it out, in sound pulses or radio waves that are broadcast and rebroadcast, perhaps being multiplied many times before you have created all the text, which is never stored in static form anywhere. If you want to be limited to more primitive technology, you could imagine a setup where each individual page is continually being multiply copied and the copied-from page destroyed as the book is being written, so at no point in time do we ever have just one "original". Yet we could have one text, thus, reasonably, one book only, just stored in a funny way. Pizer also said, "the essence of a person is experiencing, not lifeless information." There are a number of things I could say in reply to this, but one point I think is especially worth making. I am arguing, above, that a book is not simply a specific copy but something apart from its copies. This is contested by Pizer, but even if the point is conceded, it still can be claimed that the book example does not apply to persons because books are only lifeless things anyway. A person, apparently, must still be "embodied" as a material thing, or it can't exist. But I submit that this does not follow, even though a functioning person is not simply a static entity such as a book. It is possible also to think of an ongoing *process* from an informational standpoint, so that one process-in-progress could have several instantiations, much as a book can be said to have them. Maybe a passable illustration from everyday experience is a performance of a musical composition. It is "something in motion" not just a static body of information. Yet "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" is not just some particular performance, nor is it some particular copy of the score. It is not, I submit, any material thing yet it is something very real. Ditto people. A final thought is that matter, which is so mutable and really ephemeral and evanescent when you examine it closely, is not so "real" at all as *some* things we have to class as immaterial. Pi will outlast any material record of its digits, and I hope to outlast any one body. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21306