X-Message-Number: 2730
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: CRYONICS Re: Want/Ought
Date: Sun, 8 May 1994 11:23:25 -0700 (PDT)

For Bob Ettinger:

About finding out what we "ought" to want:

I do not understand the meaning of this statement. It is certainly true that 
people often want inconsistent things; in this respect the only sane thing
to do, I believe, is to think again very carefully about what you want. The

inconsistency can come from some side of the physical world (you simply haven't 
got enough money for what you want, or we have no means to make your two wants
simultaneously possible, or if you want X the only way we know to give it to
you is to give you Y also, which you just say that you do NOT want ...).

That inconsistency seems to me the only way I can interpret a statement of what
you or someone, anyone "ought" to want. And it's certainly often true that two
people, each of whom has no inconsistency at all in their wants, may have wants
that conflict badly. The universe is hard, nor was it created for us to be
happy in it.

Can you please explain what you mean when you say "ought to want"?

For anyone concerned with materialism versus spiritualism in cryonics or
elsewhere:

Descartes (given the time at which he wrote) made a pardonable error which by
now is no longer quite so pardonable. The world does not consist totally of
atoms ("hard" substances). It also contains many ARRANGEMENTS of these atoms.
There is no conflict with materialism in believing that these arrangements

This is not a difficult idea to understand. When we speak of someone's book or

piece of music, we aren't speaking of particular atoms but of their 
arrangement.There is no separate spiritual realm in which these arrangements 
exist, nor
does it require a belief in quantum mechanics to understand these arrangements.
Some things appear in many copies, but remain the same book. 


Similarly I believe my brain and my memories are an arrangement of atoms. 
Unlikea book, however, there remains a lot that we don't understand about this 
arrangement. Furthermore, again unlike the book, we have no way to duplicate it
at present. This means that if that arrangement is destroyed (leaving aside 
the many meanings of "destroyed" for a moment) then it will cease to exist.
If you wish to speak of a soul in this connection, then there is no reason not
to do so, but only so long as you remember that in this setting, a soul is
a material thing just as a book is a material thing. There is no separate 
"spiritual" world (or "platonic" world) in which these objects have a separate
existence.

				Long long life,

					Thomas Donaldson

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