X-Message-Number: 26630 Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 23:48:48 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: Re: continuity and the lack of it References: <> I'm arriving late in this discussion, so maybe I missed something previously stated, but it touches an area of special concern to me. > Suppose I am copied while suspended, then destroyed, and > sometime later my copy is revived. From my subjective point > of view (where 'my' refers to the original, from whence the > copy was derived), is this scenario equivalent to > annihilation, or a deep sleep? rbr says "annihilation" and so do I. But where does rbr draw the line? Suppose he is cryopreserved imperfectly and then resuscitated after some repairs that were necessary as a result of incomplete cryoprotection. Suppose half his brain is accurately rebuilt as a copy. Has he been annihilated or not? Suppose only one-quarter of the brain is rebuilt ... or three-quarters ... or 99 percent ... or 1 percent. rbr says these are not fuzzy questions, but they look fuzzy to me. If I am revived after 3 minutes of cardiac arrest at normothermic temperature, or 60 minutes of surgery involving cardiac arrest with mild hypothermia, or 100 years of vitrification, I think these are likely to be three entirely different subjective experiences and probably can be objectively differentiated too, in terms of what we could measure in the brain. Do "I" care if "I" am revived after 3 minutes? Yes. After 60 minutes? Probably. After 100 years? Not so sure. Everyone has a visceral, subjective idea of when the period of downtime or the process of repair becomes so extensive, the break in continuity is unacceptable. Trying to define this as a universal principle does not make sense to me, because the sense of self itself is entirely a subjective thing. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26630